This was written for a recent REWIND column in the South China Morning Post, a look back at the seminal surrealist masterpiece Doolittle by The Pixies - which is now being toured and performed in its entirety by the reformed magical realists of rock and roll. An excellent trend, in my opinion, encouraging musical artists to stick with the musical longform of the album with a view to producing a classic which one day might be taken on the road to celebrate - and to cash in.
Forget
whatever you've read lately of the superannuated stumblings of The Pixies. Leave aside the phoned-in performances, the
tawdry sackings of Kim Deal clones, the increasingly pudgy petulance,
songwriting flabbiness and sonic flatulence of Black Francis/Frank
Black, aka Charles Thompson, indie rock's poet laureate of
LOUDsoftLOUD weirdness.
All ye
know on earth and all ye need to know is that The Pixies produced
four of the best, truest and most beautiful records ever made in
little more than as many years; a short sharp spurt of genius that
places them in the pantheon, demigods who will dwell forever upon the
upper slopes of the Olympus Mons and Mount Shasta and in the deepest
reaches of the ocean's abysses. If Frank Black wants to spend the rest
of his years recording an Indie Cindy a week while eating
cheeseburgers two-handed and going Donald Trump on a conga line of
bassists, it matters not, for rock's greatest quadrilogy remains
unassailable.
To
wit: the chaotic jagged jangle and shimmer of Surfer Rosa, a gigantic
record that poked broken guitar strings through the coke-bloated
heart of cock rock from way out in the water in 1988; Doolittle, the
groundswell set off by Surfer Rosa's splashing about in strange seas
that was released less than a year later, making a lie of its name,
the cheeky numerate simian on the sleeve hinting at the oddapalooza
of arcane subject matter and unfettered monkey business within; the
velour velocity, pure ferocity and high gloss sheen of Bossanova, and
finally, the sad aliens, lonely bird dreams and towering pipe dreams
of Trompe Le Monde.
Doolittle
is first among equals, the Wave of Mutilation (track three, which by
its first line has referenced Charles Manson and the Beach boys
before delving into Californian mysticism and weather phenomena)
which swept all before it and left a gasping tidewrack of imitators,
homage payers, plagiarists, envious lesser talents and sniping
critics in its wake. It is the most picked over, pecked and dissected
corpse on rock's slab, borrowed by talent, stolen by genius, feted by
the cognoscenti and elevated by the Illuminati ('No Doolittle, no
Nevermind' Kurt Cobain once said).
Doolittle
is nothing less than a musical tsunami, one that took time to build
but whose grace notes and nuances and ambitions and originality of
vision refract and wash up in the strangest and most unlikely places.
One minute whispering death, a surge of unimaginable depth and power
pulsing through one's being, the next as loud as hell, a ringing
bell, warning siren and churning maelstrom that makes your heart
sing, your lungs burst and your ears bleed.
From the moment Black Francis wails about slicing up eyeballs on Debaser, the opening homage to Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, he sets out his surreal stall and sets the controls for the heart of some black hole sun, a dark fluid place where crustaceans dine on rotting flesh and vampires feed amidst biblical violence and apocalyptic imagery, torture porn and tattooed tits, divinity and death, a world summoned in screams and gulps and croons juxtaposed with the shimmering strings and double-tracked polish of Gil Norton's production.
Perfect
two-minute nuggets of LOUDsoft shape-shifting splendour unravel with
the light and sound and fury of some sea monster striking a lure and
making a run for the Mariana trench. Deeper and sweeter and darker it
spirals, from the uneasy peachy keenness of Here Comes Your Man, La
La Love You and Monkey's Gone to Heaven, breakneck bonesetters like
Crackity Jones and Tame, which along with Mr Grieves, Dead and Gouge
Away go big on biblical themes and surrealist memes.
The
weirdo lyrics always reward investigation: Dead's repeated shriek of
'Uriah hit the crapper' I took to be some dig at Uriah Heep until
realising the entire song was written as King David vocalising his
lust for that crazy biblical babe Bathsheba, who he saw bathing,
sending her husband away to be killed at war so he could have his way
with her.
Doolittle
was originally intended to be called Whore, as in the great biblical
Whore of Babylon. Black acquiesced in the face of record label
pressure. That which we call Surfer Rosa by any other name would sound as sweet; any way you slice or gouge it, Doolittle remains a revelation.
