100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Debaser

02 Tame

03 Wave of Mutilation

04 I Bleed

05 Here Comes Your Man

06 Dead

07 Monkey Gone to Heaven

08 Mr. Grieves

09 Crackity Jones

10 La La Love You

11 No. 13 Baby

12 There Goes My Gun

13 Hey

14 Silver

15 Gouge Away

Doolittle, the second Pixies album and a touchstone for the looming alternative rock era, is a distinctly American record, both wholesome and depraved, seeing both salvation and savagery in the spiritual, and strangely friendly.

The band came from Boston, a city founded by Puritans and subsequently known for more nefarious residents, and they had welcoming songs about the end of the world and ritualistic murders. ‘Must be a devil between us/Or whores in my head/Whores at my door/Whores in my bed,’ the group’s frontman and songwriter, Black Francis, sang on ‘Hey’, and across the album the Pixies brought these snatches of timeless revelation to life. Fittingly, the record became the Old Testament of grunge rock.

The Pixies congealed in January 1986 and from there things moved fast, with university acquaintances Black Francis and guitarist Joey Santiago joined by bassist Kim Deal and drummer David Lovering. They were playing shows by the middle of that year and cut a demo soon after that ended up at Britain’s 4AD Records, who swiftly released the Come on Pilgrim mini-album in September 1987 and the Surfer Rosa album in March 1988. By October of that year they were preparing for the next album, and the speed with which they moved is important, for there was something unfiltered about the Pixies, as if the songs had emerged complete and without second thought.

The difference between their previous tracks and those on Doolittle was the presence of English producer Gil Norton. He worked on the arrangements and provided a contrast to the band’s abrasive force, and that would enhance the soft/loud dynamic (or what could also be considered the stable/deranged dynamic) that would become a Pixies trademark. The initial parts on ‘Tame’ are crisply focused – a snare drum and an undulating bassline, with Black Francis whispering about how the woman that fascinates the song’s protagonist has ‘got hips like Cinderella’ – but once he’s screaming the title above razor sharp guitar the title is a misnomer. The singer’s laboured, excited breathing is echoed by Deal’s backing vocal and in just under two minutes the song is a psychosexual cauldron.

In an America where the college rock scene was still getting to grips with R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Black Francis was an exciting presence. On ‘Debaser’ he alludes to Salvador Dalí and Luis Bunuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (‘Got me a movie/I want you to know/Slicing up eyeballs’), and surrealism was a recurring inspiration. Perhaps the best comparison at the time was David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, which uncovered a nightmarish world poised to engulf everyday normalcy. The Pixies’ tracks such as ‘Dead’ and ‘Crackity Jones’ created their own fractured world, and there was no feeling of slow immersion – Santiago’s strangled, sometimes scorched guitar created a backdrop from scratch.

But along with the fervent was a graceful, sometimes serene, embrace of the apocalyptic. On ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’, accentuated by a string section, an environmental disaster allows for humanity’s obliteration of a deity (Neptune gets taken out by ‘ten million pounds of sludge’) and a reordering of the spiritual order, while ‘Gouge Away’ sets the biblical narrative of Samson and Delilah to a menacing bassline. And the songs unfurl with startling ease and almost instantaneous accommodation: ‘I Bleed’, with its layers of voices from the subconscious, gives way to the lovely ‘Here Comes Your Man’, before the rumbling, primal ‘Dead’ storms forth. There is no friction, just an ecstatic acceptance. ‘My mind secedes,’ declares Black Francis in ‘I Bleed’, and subsequent generations knew just what he meant.