No doubt about it, the only honourable reaction to this compilation is an exasperated cry of "where did it all go wrong?" Think back to 1987 and 1988, when this collection begins. Public Enemy are re-inventing hip hop with "Yo! Bum Rush The Show" and "It Takes A Nations Of Millions To Hold Us Back", raising the intellectual and ideological standards of the genre to the point where you wonder "wow, imagine how advanced rap will be in 16 years time". 2004 and OutKast aside, where are we? Back in the toilet, swamped in regression.
The Pixies ought to have been Year Zero. We should be surrounded by guitar groups who manage to transform complex time signatures, twisted lyrical obsessions and sudden bursts of a foreign language into the most thrilling, populist music imaginable. Instead, there's the garage rock hordes wilfully going backwards, painting themselves into a reductive retro corner and the likes of f**king Nickelback, howling melodrama for the delight of the multinationals and tw*ts who drink in identikit coffee shops. Again, regression.
Pay attention, guitar groups. Here's how it goes. Disturb your audience. Disturb your bandmates. Disturb yourself. Make your music feel sinister, elemental, unquenchable, sordid yet exhilarating. Don't just invent a dynamic that will be (wrongly) interpreted and appropriated as quiet-loud-quiet. Make it pricky anticipation-raging catharsis-pricky aftermath. Remember that noise without drama is empty bluster, that meaning and narrative close you in, that nothing spices up a tune better than a killer bassline and a bit of voodoo eroticism.
Bad news, friends. If you're not doing this already, you never will. You can study the blueprints contained herein for decades – soak up the shape shifting lip licking tension of "Caribou", the drip drip drip stalker's seduction of "Hey", the unstoppable downhill tumble of "Broken Face", garguantan platectonic riffery of "Monkey Gone To Heaven", the soppy acoustic beauty of "Here Comes Your Man". But you don't simply learn how to toy with traditions and expectations like this. You're just pond scum waiting for lightning to strike, for talent to rain.
How did the Pixies do it? Simple. They were geniuses. End of story. If only all reviews were as easy to write. They were instinctive, intuitive, as compulsive as goosebumps and deep breathing. They were twisted in all senses of the word – melodies came out tangled, jagged, and lyrics were skewed, screwed, digging deep down into the dark parts of the human psyche with word association yelps and no looking back. And it all came completely naturally. They wrote like this because it's how they were, how their minds worked. Flash! Kaboom!
Where did it all go wrong? Well, genius runs out. That's the price you pay. We're lucky to have got so much. By the time they got to "Trompe Le Monde", they were a group running on empty. No wonder, look how much they'd invested in those early records. But there's another factor to take into consideration. The legacy of The Pixies died the day that a blonde waster from Seattle picked up a copy of "Doolittle" and felt
those first pangs of inspiration. Wow - quiet, loud, quiet. Not so sure about the babbled Spanish and the rest of the rough edges. But imagine what that "Debaser" song would sound like with some metal up its ass.
So there it is. Death to the Pixies? Too late. Kurt Cobain got there first.
by Ian Watson