| Product: |
Doolittle - Pixies |
| Date: |
25/03/01 (165 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: A giant band at the height of its powers
Disadvantages: It'd be petty to grumble...
The five-star rating will already have clued you in on how I feel about this album. But unlike many Pixies devotees, I don't rate it as their best -- I'd reserve that accolade for its predecessor, Surfer Rosa.
Compare the two and Doolittle is both more polished and more accomplished, musically. It's filled to the brim with indisputable classics -- they even broke through with 'Monkey Gone to Heaven', although quite how it managed to surface throught the mire of pop crud clogging up the charts at the time (as ever) remains a mystery. Sheer magnificence, perhaps...
'Debaser' rates as my favourite track, but then it arrived just at the height of my Dali (and by association, Bunuel) infatuation so that probably had an influence, given its unsubtle Chien Andalou references. 'Gouge Away' is closest of all to the sort gut-wrenching, bile-spewing musical explosion that drew me to the band in the first place. 'Mr Greaves' is a toe-tapper with a nice line in oddness -- "you can cry, you can mope/but can you swing from a good rope?". I could go on.
If you don't know the band then you'll be wanting clues about the sound -- well Lou Reed / Velvet Underground was always cited (explicitly, in one song) as an influence, along with Husker Du. Nirvana even tried to BE the Pixies (and failed...sorry Kurt). But it's hard to make a direct comparision. Think tortured guitars, snappy drums and wailing, menacing vocals and you'll be getting there, kind of.
Most fans seem to agree that Doolittle marked the apotheosis of whatever it was that the Pixies were trying to achieve, and I don't think I'd argue with that. But I said at the start that I think that Surfer Rosa was better and I think it's the fact that that album is less polished, less accomplished, that attracts me to it. More raw, I suppose -- where this album has been mixed, Surfer Rosa was (by all accounts) recorded
effectivetly as live, and the difference comes across in the sheer energy of the performances.
But don't, by any means, let that put you off buying this album. Most people will probably find it more accessible, and it is perhaps as close to a 'perfect Pixies album' as they ever managed to record.
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