Bossanova - Pixies

.../> 1) '''Cecilia Ann''' - Bossanova plays its surf card from the off, with a cover of an instrumental track by a semi-obscure band called the Surftones. The original sounds very Dick Dale, and the Pixies make it sound like Dick Dale too, only a Dick Dale who's in the throes of some sort of chronic psychosis. It's interesting to note that apparently the other cover they considered for this spot was of 'Apache' by the Shadows, which raises the thought ...
...Clifford of Richard backed by the Pixies.

'Hey! You guys! You play so loud that nobody can hear me singing, and what's this bit about losing my penis to a whore with disease??'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUqSMzmBA14

2) '''Rock Music''' - Having been eased in with the opener, and being foolish enough to believe me when I said this was a softer, more user-friendly Pixies album, this Ronseal Quick Drying ... more

Imagine the predicament.

It's 1990. A decade largely bereft of taste has given way to another decade that will be similarly deficient. Your band and your songs have quietly (well, rather loudly at times, but hey ho) reinvented indie rock during two shatteringly good albums (but you don't really know it yet). But what you DO know is that all is not well with Boston's finest.

For a start, you're not really a Boston band anymore, with a membership strewn across the States from sea to shining sea: hence you only really get together to record or tour...you ain't a gang like in the old days. Especially since, fed up with both her comparative unreliability (certainly when set against your puritanical work ethic) and what you view as her disproportionate level of fan love, you've just come within a hair's breadth of firing the bassist, and now the pair of you aren't talking. You feel that you've taken your template of sex, death, mutilation and religion (not that you'll ever admit it's a template, what with being an avowed surrealist and all) just about as far as it can go. And you have an unscratchable itch to make the band that started out as your band into YOUR band again.

Welcome to Charles Michael Kittridge 'Black Francis' Thompson IV's world as he planned 'Bossanova'.

Dialling back the abrasion (although sometimes the listener is hard-pressed to notice) and upping the poppiness, this time around you claim to be taking inspiration from surf music and sci-fi: the former because your lead guitarist loves it and you live in California now, and the latter because you had a UFO experience as a child and have always been obsessed with the subject. The end result is an album that hipster fans think is uncool to like, unless they're the kind of fans who deliberately like the uncool because they think it's cool. The benefit of nigh-on 20 years of hindsight tells the listener that, while there's an element of 'filler' creeping in that never broke out on previous Pixies records, the good stuff is sufficiently good (and is sufficiently abundant) to make this essential too.

Anyway, let's Bossanova, shall we? I'll lead.

All My Thoughts...

1) Cecilia Ann - Bossanova plays its surf card from the off, with a cover of an instrumental track by a semi-obscure band called the Surftones. The original sounds very Dick Dale, and the Pixies make it sound like Dick Dale too, only a Dick Dale who's in the throes of some sort of chronic psychosis. It's interesting to note that apparently the other cover they considered for this spot was of 'Apache' by the Shadows, which raises the thought of what it would have been like to have Sir Clifford of Richard backed by the Pixies.

'Hey! You guys! You play so loud that nobody can hear me singing, and what's this bit about losing my penis to a whore with disease??'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUqSMzmBA14

2) Rock Music - Having been eased in with the opener, and being foolish enough to believe me when I said this was a softer, more user-friendly Pixies album, this Ronseal Quick Drying Woodstain of a track may frighten the life out of you. One of the very best Black Francis screamers, it's a perfect depiction of Charles Thompson's 'sound fantastic, mean nothing' dictum. A wall of Joey Santiago mania provides a thrilling backdrop to the repeated, terrifying shriek of 'your mouth's a mile away'. What the hell is it about? Who cares. It has no purpose other than to sound like the coolest thing in the world, and for its 1:50 running time, it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbRbCtIgW3A

3) Velouria - Finally things settle down with what for the Pixies constitutes a hit single (number 28, pop pickers, and they nearly appeared on 'Wogan': the mind boggles). Originally a song about a girl called Victoria, Thompson (allegedly because the Kinks had already done such a song) turned it into an ode to crushed velvet...probably. It's hard to tell, as there's some great free-association going on in the lyrics (I especially like the reference to 'the tears of Shasta sheen'. Thompson's songs are full of stuff like this: at the time he claimed he wrote lyrics by shouting at his bathroom mirror and going with what sounded good). Although obviously rockin' (and with a great tune) the track seems less hardcore due to the last great call-and-response Black Francis / Kim Deal vocal and the use of theramin whistling away in the background. Oh, and it has the worst video in the world, and I'm saying that despite having seen David Hasselhoff's 'Hooked On A Feeling'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhox4_SeHQ

4) Allison - This time a song about a girl called Alison was nixed because Elvis Costello had already done one...hence this miniature masterpiece (Thompson, ever the master of the condensed ditty, manages to get intro-verse-verse-chorus-guitar solo-bridge-chorus into 1:18) is about jazz maestro Mose Allison. Well, so he says anyway, since it's another riot of automatic writing...but I can forgive a man who opens a song with the line 'from distant star to this here bar' just about anything. Here concludeth the magnificent opening salvo.

5) Is She Weird? - Sharing a bassline with the classic 'Gouge Away' from 'Doolittle' to the extent that Thompson has been known to start singing the wrong one in concert, this is a song about his then-girlfriend-later-wife-now-ex-wife Jean. Marked out by a whispered vocal that slowly works up to a slightly restrained scream and by Santiago's simple little guitar motifs, it's a mid-tempo number that somewhat betrays the lack of intra-band relations by this point: apparently the producer (Gil Norton) did most of the backing vocals himself.

6) Ana - Another mid-tempo track (but much more successful), this lovely semi-acoustic surf paean is one of the more obvious examples of Thompson's love of word games and word play. As far as the cognoscenti know, this is the first instance of his using an acrostic (the first letter of each line spells something out, in this case S-U-R-F-E-R: it's a trick he's used at least three times since). Stuck for an idea as to what to do for the second verse, Thompson simply redid the first a semi-tone lower. Necessity, mother of invention, etc.

7) All Over The World - At more than five minutes, this is grandstandingly epic by Pixies standards. Basically two songs stuck together, the first three minutes are a poppy rock song, marked by the usual quiet-loud dynamics (Thompson's barely heard exhortation at 0:43 that 'everybody rock out' at the start of the song's first Santiago guitar meltdown is hilarious once you know it's there), the last two and a half a languid affair featuring a more spacey guitar tone.

8) Dig For Fire - When he went to study Spanish in Puerto Rico, legend has it that Thompson took just one tape: 'Little Creatures' by Talking Heads. (He claims to have tried to take his Iggy Pop albums too, but they didn't record: so he ended up with blank tapes with 'Iggy Pop' written on them). His love of the Heads comes out in this song with its obvious vocal Byrneisms and interlocking guitar lines. It also has an unusually 'obvious' chorus which forced unwanted (by the band, anyway) single status upon it. And a slick, of-its-time video that in its way is almost as terrible as the 'Velouria' promo. And unsurprisingly, it makes no conventional sense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KizhSRp85W4

9) Down To The Well - Every Pixies album, even the later ones, features at least one song originally on the fabled Purple Tape: the demos from which their label (indie uberlords 4AD) culled their first mini-LP 'Come On Pilgrim'. Here lies the 'Bossanova' instance of that particular phenomenon. A plodding number with scratchy rhythm guitar, typical Santiago string bending, Kim murmuring and Black Francis occasionally screaming. I'm struggling. Filler.

10) The Happening - And now the album hits the second of its streaks of brilliance: the next three songs are terrific. First up is one of the band's most obvious sci-fi numbers. A tribute to Vegas talk show host Billy Goodman (a man whose show was taken up by, as Black Francis put it, 'UFO stuff people calling in to tell of how their husband got murdered by an alien') articulating a wish that if the aliens actually land, Goodman and his listeners will get the credit. Turning standard Pixies procedure on its head, here Francis screams the verses and scales angelic heights on the choruses, before a two-minute playout in sonnet form. Yes, really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNm1ZF8wwg

11) Blown Away - One of Thompson's favourite Pixies songs, recorded in Hansa Studios, Berlin, where Bowie did his 'Berlin Trilogy': one of the more extravagant sessions in their career. He claims it was written having taken a couple of days off on a tour in a hotel room next door to Kim Deal (to whom he wasn't speaking at the time, and who to Thompson's extreme annoyance had decided they wanted a couple of days off the tour too) listening to Leonard Cohen's 'I'm Your Man' on repeat. Structurally very simple, nothing but verses with chugging rhythm guitar, bass and drums, what makes it one of the very best Pixies tracks are the vocals, which are deeply eerie, and Santiago's guitar, which somehow manages to be wailing and strangled at the same time.

'Like one of those Neil Young love songs that exist out there in space somewhere. It's not about anyone or anything specifically. It's not about her eyes or the back of her knees.'

12) Hang Wire - A cracking little Thompson ditty, with the first two verses in haiku format: you just have to love this man. Declaimed verses, screamed choruses, helium backing vocals, budda-budda bass, solid drums and gloriously textured lead guitar: the gang's all here. The denouement is quite brilliant: urgency builds, Thompson and Deal start screaming/responding, and Santiago does a quite fabulous spidery guitar motif.

13) Stormy Weather - 'It is time for stormy weather...'

A bizarre track, originally intended as a 'b' side, it starts very very ponderously, suddenly speeding up a bit, developing into a melee of guitar and vocal overdubs, while relentlessly repeating the same line of lyric, over and over. An in-studio confection that underwhelms in this company.

14) Havalina - Apparently 'havalina' is the Spanish word for wild boar, but when dealing with an avowed surrealist it's as well to dance around the literal. Whatever: this is probably the prettiest thing the band ever recorded, a semi-acoustic ballad garnished with very understated Santiago stylings, and with all sorts of odd time signature stuff going on. Thompson is most definitely in choirboy mode here, and anyone wanting to know exactly why Kim Deal was considered quite so cool at the time is respectfully pointed towards the way she sings the word 'Arizona' at 1:25.

'Are You Looking For The Motherlode?'

In purely commercial terms, this was as good as it got for the Pixies, culminating in an apocalyptic headline set at that year's Reading Festival: the first Gulf War was a pretty decent time for a festival crowd to be chanting 'Where Is My Mind?' and 'Stormy Weather'. On they laboured, working at a rate that would melt an act without Charles Thompson's ethos and voracious songwriting muse, and melted anyway. One more album ensued, the beserker eclecticism that is 'Trompe Le Monde', before the tensions between Thompson and Deal finally ran their inevitable course. Alt-rock exploded without them, but their star curiously grew brighter with their absence, and with 2004's ravenously received reunion the band finally got proof of (and paid for, and there's nothing wrong with getting paid, boys and girls) the stealthy-yet-huge influence that they'd wrought.

So where does 'Bossanova' sit? Possibly the one to go for if you're bothered by all that scary noise (in which case skip track two for the good of your health), not the best of their albums, maybe it actually IS their worst...but it's getting five stars anyway. Now I just have to work out how to give six stars to all the others.

(Available for under a fiver on Amazon). 

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