656. Pixies - Doolittle (1989)
















Track Listing

1. Debaser
2. Tame
3. Wave Of Mutilation
4. I Bleed
5. Here Comes Your Man
6. Dead
7. Monkey Gone To Heaven
8. Mr Grieves
9. Crackity Jones
10. La La Love You
11. No. 13 Baby
12. There Goes My Gun
13. Hey
14. Silver
15. Gouge Away

Review

Ah, the other great Pixies album, after the amazing Surfer Rosa, the Pixies tone it down slightly for Doolittle their second masterpiece, and that it is. The sound isn't as heavy as in the Steve Albini produced Surfer Rosa, but there is still plenty of noise in the more pop sheen of the thing.

Then all the songs are memorable in their own right and that is what makes for a truly great album, nothing to skip, nothing to say "eh" it is all good, all fun and incredibly all quite different. In fact this album is a showcase of what the Pixies can do, and that is quite a lot of styles. The only thing that annoys me is Black singing Chien Andalusia in Debaser instead of Chien Andalus which is the name of the film he is referring to.

I might still like Surfer Rosa slightly better than this one, and I like these two definitely better than any other Pixies albums, but the difference in quality is quite small, they are both 10s, only Surfer is possibly a more perfect 10, even if this is the more accessible album of the two and probably the album a newcomer should start with.

Track Highlights

1. Wave Of Mutilation
2. Here Comes Your Man
3. Hey
4. Mr. Grieves

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

However, Doolittle received mixed reviews from several music critics. Time Out said that "Gil Norton's toy theatre production makes a drama out of what should have been a crisis." Spin ran a hundred-word review of the album, including critic Joe Levy's comment "the insanity less surreal and more silly, and the songs themselves more like songs and less like adventures." Rolling Stone, reviewing the album in July 1988, gave the album three and a half stars. Doolittle appeared on several end-of-year "Best Album" lists; both Rolling Stone and The Village Voice placed the album tenth, and independent music magazines Sounds and Melody Maker both ranked the album as the second best of the year. NME also ranked the album highly, placing it fourth in their end-of-year list.

A range of music magazines have since acclaimed Doolittle as one of the quintessential alternative rock albums of the 1980s. Rolling Stone, reviewing Doolittle again in 2002, gave the album five stars out of five, remarking that it laid the "groundwork for Nineties rock." Doolittle has received a number of international accolades and is consistently noted as one of the best albums of the 1980s in any genre. The band's later albums have failed to attract the same level of retrospective critical praise.

Rolling Stone is soooo shit.

Here comes Your Man: