Pixies – ‘Surfer Rosa’
There’s something about those drums. The first notes of music that you hear on the Pixies‘ debut album Surfer Rosa aren’t actually notes at all: they’re rhythms. Specifically, they’re a churning drum beat that is relatively simple but sounds completely unlike anything else. For a number of people, that beat would become the starting point for their entire careers.
The most obvious is David Lovering, the underrated and masterful drummer who remains one of the anchors of the Pixies’ sound. But the actual sound of the drums is a calling card for another person involved in the making of Surfer Rosa: engineer and “producer” Steve Albini (just don’t call him the album’s producer). In an age where gated drums and electronics were all the rage, the former Big Black frontman went for something rawer and more impactful. The unvarnished sound is a significant reason why artists flocked to Albini, but he isn’t the only influential individual to emerge out of Surfer Rosa.
Across more than three decades of music, finding a rock artist who hasn’t channelled the style that the Pixies pioneered on their debut album is nearly impossible. As the template for both grunge and eventual post-punk/pop-punk/garage-rock/everything-rock, Surfer Rosa is one of the most consequential records of all time. A potent mix of the Pixies’ biggest hits and some of their best deep cuts, Surfer Rosa establishes the singular writing style of Charles ‘Black Francis’ Thompson, the essential counter-punch of Kim Deal, the iconic lead guitar of Joey Santiago, and the foundational thump of Lovering.
It’s all there in ‘Bone Machine’: rock-solid rhythms, a deceptively simple bassline, harried vocal howls, stinging guitar lines, strange fetishization, occasional diversions into Mexico, and some off-kilter melodies that could almost be considered poppy. Of course, there’s also the soft-loud dynamics that work’s as the band’s signature, but it’s more restrained in ‘Bone Machine’, with everyone but Francis and Deal dropping out to sing the song’s title phrase.
Francis, in particular, is fully formed on Surfer Rosa. Meditations on mutilation come through loud and clear on ‘Break My Body’ and ‘Broken Face’, while those same tracks contain occasional snippets of beauty within their depraved declarations of incest and disfigurement. Francis doesn’t have the low growl that would become emblematic of grunge: he delivers a high-piercing wail that could turn into an otherworldly shriek at any moment. Even though their greatest impact would be on Seattle, the Pixies are clearly Boston punks who need to reconcile their love of gentle folk and potent pop.
That push and pull are most clearly heard on the album’s two most iconic tracks, ‘Gigantic’ and ‘Where Is My Mind?’. The latter is helmed by Deal in a rare lead vocal and co-writing appearance, lumbering out the song’s iconic bassline while fantasizing about a particularly “gifted” male suitor. Ebbing and flowing between sparse verses and euphoric choruses, ‘Gigantic’ lets Deal’s smoother voice carry the song’s melody to places that Francis’ more ragged bleat could never.
Then there is ‘Where Is My Mind?’. Originally just another album track, ‘Where Is My Mind?’ has now officially become the band’s landmark song. Working with just three notes, Santiago crafts a hypnotizing lead guitar line that establishes his reputation as an old-school riff rock master. Francis visits unknown depths underwater while trying to locate his thoughts, crafting perhaps the most unusual yet oddly traditional pop song in the band’s canon. It’s impossible to argue against the craft and precision in ‘Where Is My Mind?’, from the chord progression to the uncomplicated rhythm section to Deal’s haunted backing vocals. No matter how many times you hear it, ‘Where Is My Mind?’ can still floor you with its stark hooks.
But Surfer Rosa is more than its best-known songs. ‘Something Against You’ takes a rubbery quasi-ska approach to psychobilly, while ‘I’m Amazed’ positions all four band members against each other in a dead sprint to the song’s minute-long finish line. ‘I’m Amazed’ contains another unique element to Surfer Rosa: the banter that Albini caught in the studio. Deal details accusations made against a former field hockey coach, with Francis joking that he went out of the team once he heard. The last minute of ‘Oh My Golly!’ also contains snippets of Francis explaining a joke to Albini. It’s a strange gimmick that Albini adds to the album, something that he later came to regret, but it does add a certain unique character to the record.
‘River Euphrates’ captures another trip to a foreign country, this time ending up in the Gaza Strip as the band parse through the intricate rhythmic changes that make up the song’s arrangement. Both Francis and Deal struggle to breathe during the insistent “ride, ride, ride” vocal lines, a quirk that remains preserved on the final mix of the album. Albini’s approach to recording was no-frills: if you hit an errant off-key note, fumbled a rhythm, or messed up, you better have a damn good reason to call for another take. Albini went for feel and humanistic charm over perfection, and ‘River Euphrates’ is the perfect example of that.
The flip side of Surfer Rosa is a fascinating trip through deeper Pixies cuts, with the occasional iconic track popping up. ‘Where Is My Mind?’ leads off, but then the quasi-T. Rex chug of ‘Cactus’ pops up, featuring a prison tale of bloodstained dresses and sexual perversions. ‘Tony’s Theme’ acts as a theme song for a superhero that doesn’t exist, complete with an enthusiastic spoken word intro from Deal. ‘Oh My Golly!’ is an unhinged Spanish-language punk track that brings the album’s eponymous character into the action.
Then comes ‘Vamos’, one of the Pixies’ most unlikely calling cards. Spanish lyrics and callbacks to New Jersey would reappear throughout the band’s future songs, and the loosely-structured ‘Vamos’ quickly becomes a runaway train of rhythm, scattered thoughts, and a wild collage-like guitar solo from Santiago featuring studio edits from Albini. Originally featured on the band’s first demo recording, The Purple Tape, ‘Vamos’ then appeared on the band’s first official release, Come On Pilgrim. During live shows, the track is a showcase for Santiago, spotlighting the guitarist’s penchant for noise and chaotic improvisations. Since most of Santiago’s guitar work is song-serving and relatively pre-planned, the open spaces and unknown corners of ‘Vamos’ are a welcome invitation into radical unpredictability.
Surfer Rosa concludes with the groovy stop-start ‘Brick is Red’, with Santiago’s hairy lead lines numbing up against Francis’ lo-fi acoustic strums. Revisiting the fishy preoccupations of ‘Where Is My Mind?’, Francis insists that it isn’t his time to go, adding a cheeky end to Surfer Rosa. These kinds of tricks (saying you’re not leaving on the final song, incorporating studio banter, and the like) risk making Surfer Rosa look cheesy. But the music that keeps getting shot out of the speakers is so defiant that no amount of studio trickery could distract from it.
Unsurprisingly, everyone from Kurt Cobain to Billy Corgan took notes from Surfer Rosa. What is surprising is that the album sounds remarkably modern: with a live sound and very few notable overdubs or effects, Surfer Rosa continues to be the template from which almost every indie band attempts to replicate themselves. If anything, Surfer Rosa is one of the few albums that could truly come out today and sound just as contemporary as it did in the late 1980s.
