It's time to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the iconic (and somewhat unusual) debut album by those indie legends, Pixies.
Released on 21 March 1988, and hot on the heels of their first EP, Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa was a sonic assault, with lyrical imagery to boggle your mind (and if you actually understood what Black Francis was singing about, maybe make you feel a little uneasy too).
The band almost sunk without trace though - while generally critically acclaimed, the album didn't fare so well. While it did circle around the UK Indie Chart for quite a while, and peaked at number two, it never made an impact on the main chart. In their native US, it was only available on import to begin with, before finally getting a release on the US branch of Rough Trade (it eventually reached Gold sales status there in 2005). There was only one single from it, Gigantic, which scraped into the UK Top100 (#93).
Gigantic: https://youtu.be/xJncHEZ3URs
The band had signed with legendary UK label, 4AD, in the spring of 1987. Their early demos, known through legend as The Purple Tape, gave them the material for Come On Pilgrim, released in October 87, and by November they were back in the studio preparing for their debut album.
Recording
They ended up with Steve Albini, who was recommended to 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell. He met them for dinner at drummer David Lovering's house and apparently they were in the studio the very next day! They recorded at Q Division studio, in the Boston suburb of Somerville - the album was laid down in ten days and cost $10,000, of which Albini took $1,500 (he is well known for taking a flat fee for production and espousing any share of recording royalties).
Albini it seems, didn't like the studio sound all that much and ended up recording some of the album from the studio bathroom, so that he could get more echo. All of the songs on the record were written by Black Francis (Charles Thompson), except for that lone single, Gigantic, which was co-written with bassist Kim Deal.
River Euphrates (live in 2022): https://youtu.be/vAh6Xf8LpEE
As alluded to at the beginning, a lot of the themes Francis wrote about could be quite uncomfortable listening, when you could understand the lyrics. There is a lot of shrieking and yelling and more than a bit of it is sung in Spanish (he had lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico for six months during college). Songs covered mutilation, incest, superheroes and voyeurism. There was always a lot of religious imagery too, in Pixies work, in large part because Francis mum and stepdad had been involved in an evangelical church when he was younger.
Vamos (live in 2017): https://youtu.be/IJxeN2SpGWA
The Cover
The artwork for the album was composed by a friend of a friend, Simon Larbalestier, a Welsh photographer who did a lot of work for 4AD, New Scientist magazine and publishing company, Random House.
The main cover shows a flamenco dancer, a giant crucifix and a torn poster - which as he notes, "sort of loaded that with all the Catholicism." The set for the shoot was put together in a pub opposite the 4AD offices in London.
Reception
Surfer Rosa was made the album of the year in British music magazines Melody Maker and Sounds, although it featured lower down the pecking order in the others, like NME. There was talk of "memorable pop melody" (NME), "bizarre left-field out of control moments" (Underground magazine) and that the record was "beautifully brutal" (Spin magazine).
Writing about it in July 2020 for Guitar, Gary Walker said, "Pixies debut album is widely regarded as one of the most influential records of the modern era, its primal aggression and quiet-loud dynamic doing much to inspire the grunge movement that followed."
He also noted the interesting ways that the sounds the band created worked. They were "messing with song structures and pairing chords and riffs that sat uneasily." In a moment of guitar geekery, he urges the listener to, "witness the thrilling sense of discord in the riff and churning unison bends on Where Is My Mind? That song's solo, too, is unusual, Santiago [guitarist, Joey] playing notes from the B Minor pentatonic scale over major chords."
Where Is My Mind?: https://youtu.be/OJ62RzJkYUo
A Grunge-y Legacy
The album had a huge influence on the grunge scene that was to follow soon after. Kurt Cobain cited the record as the basis for Nevermind, as he felt that it fused together so well, the heavy noise and pop sensibilities that he was searching for. Billy Corgan, who would go on to found the Smashing Pumpkins, said that this was "the one that made me go 'holy shit!' It was so fresh. It rocked without being lame."
Heather Phares, on Allmusic, describes the album so well, when she noted that, "Surfer Rosa may not be the group's most accessible work, but it is one of their most compelling." No less than David Bowie called it, "the most compelling music, outside of Sonic Youth, made in the entire 80s." While Walker summed it all up when he said, "The very essence of Surfer Rosa - strange, blisteringly loud, horribly discordant and utterly enlivening."
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