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2. 15. "Mr. Grieves"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
When they wanted to, the Pixies knew how to slice through a song in two minutes. It didn't take long, and just as fast as they could explode into a flash of reds and yellows, they could cut to complete black. "Mr. Grieves" is, lyrically, a dark number with imagery that hints at death and destruction, but in sound it's pure fun, and this is perhaps what Pixies did best—not balance, but contrast.
3. 14. "Gigantic"
Album: Surfer Rosa
Year: 1988
Francis takes a rare backseat in "Gigantic," even going so far as to let Kim Deal co-write and take lead vocals. Though the result lacks the bite and punch of Black's hysterical passion, Deal's voice is fresh and clean enough to make this work, soaring above the guitars once the chorus explodes. The lyrics apparently reference interracial relationships in the dark ages of the 1950s—or perhaps she's singing about Black himself, gigantic mass of love that he is.
4. 13. "Is She Weird"
Album: Bossanova
Year: 1990
Bossanova was markedly less weird than the Pixies' earlier material. Thank God for "Is She Weird." Unlike the previous albums, Bossanova was thrown together quickly, and instead of rehearsals and practices, the band recorded many of the songs without much planning. Black Francis explained in Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies, "So I was writing [lyrics] on napkins five minutes before I sang. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not. That's just the nature of that songwriting."
"Is She Weird" feels like little pieces of a story that is too dark to fully tell. Is it about a prostitute? A goth girl? A goth prostitute? Whatever it's about, and however quickly it was thrown together, it's one of the oddest, sharpest tracks on Bossanova.
5. 12. "Break My Body"
Album: Surfer Rosa
Year: 1988
This chorus is so damn catchy that halfway through nodding your head and singing along you realize that it is pure incest and desperate self-destruction. The combination of Deal (singing slightly less sweetly on here than usual) and Francis on the hook lends to one of the most sticky Pixies songs, following down the usual path of a verse on the ground and a chorus in the sky.
6. 11. "Weird At My School"
Album: "Monkey Gone to Heaven" B-side
Year: 1989
Drugs, incestuous insinuations, sex with nuns—this one is top-ranked Pixies for obvious reasons. Even with it's far-out lyrics and grim nature, there's a playful bounce to "Weird At My School" that's present on only a few Pixies songs, but none did it as well as this B-side classic.
7. 10. "Where Is My Mind?"
Album: Surfer Rosa
Year: 1988
"Where Is My Mind?" introduced a whole new audience to the Pixies thanks to the famous last scene of Fight Club, which featured the song and drove it to a popularity that it never reached prior to the 1999 movie. Whatever it was about the song, Black Francis never quite figured it out. He talked about it in an interview: "I get probably one request every couple of months for that song to be used in some way. I can't explain it to you; I just think the song is likeable. Even though Kim barely sings on it, there's something about her singing that little haunting two note riff. The same thing with Joey, he's got a little two note thing going on too. It's so simple, and then there's me in the middle singing the wacky cute little lyrics. So it's kind of a quintessential Pixie song. It sort of displays everyone's personalities are very strong. The song has something very likeable about it and I'm not sure what it is."
8. 9. "U-Mass"
Album: Trompe Le Monde
Year: 1991
Kurt Cobain was famously quoted several times as saying that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was his attempt to rip off the Pixies, employing the quiet/loud contrast sound that the Pixies were so well known for, and many point to this song. If you listen to the chorus that kicks in at around 1:12, you can hear the similarity. But the influence goes way beyond the song format. The song was partially written while Francis and Santiago were still at the University of Massachusetts, and it encapsulates the apathy of a couple outsiders poking fun at the world surrounding them.
9. 8. "Gouge Away"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
With many Pixies' songs, that loud chorus comes out of nowhere, ripping through in a violent explosion, but "Gouge Away" feels more calculated. Right from the beginning you can see the wave coming, but it makes it no less dramatic when it crashes into one of the Pixies' biggest and best choruses. The song caps off Doolittle in a big way. Says Black Francis to Blogcritics on the meaning behind it: "'Gouge Away' is a telling of Samson and Delilah. It's a story that has anger. Do I purge via a song? I don't know. I suppose it's possible."
10. 7. "Manta Ray"
Album: "Monkey Gone to Heaven" U.K. B-side
Year: 1989
According to Black Francis, his mother had a UFO sighting when he was just three months old (month number three). He doesn't remember it, but it explains the wild imagery in "Manta Ray." From the Alternative Press: "That's my code word for UFO. It's about a UFO incident in 1965. I have it described to me in great detail by people who were there. My mother was there. This was in Nebraska. My cousin has a couple of UFO experiences, too. I've only had one and I don't even remember it; it's sort of undramatic. There were legit people who don't even follow that stuff. It's like, 'What, mom? Say that again? There was a flying saucer floating above the house for half an hour and everyone just stood there and watched it?' 'Yeah, I don't know. There was just kind of a floating saucer.' A big red fucking saucer, a glowing, fucking, flying saucer. My mother's weird, but she's not that weird."
11. 6. "Here Comes Your Man"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
The second single from Doolittle, "Here Comes Your Man" is one of the most popular Pixies songs, peaking at the No. 3 spot on the Billboard rock chart. But the song, although a breakthrough of sorts for the band, wasn't a stab at commercial success. In fact, it was a song that Black Francis had written as a teenager, and the band wasn't sure about releasing it at all. They included it in an early demo, but chose not to put it on Come On Pilgrim or Surfer Rosa. They also avoided pushing the song too hard, playing it at concerts, and performing it for television spots. While this was probably a good move to keep purists happy and keep their authenticity in tact, there's a reason why it's such an acccessible song—it's a great, catchy, well-written song, and serves as a welcoming entry point for Pixies newcomers who might not be ready for the assaultive "Tame." Are you the Nirvana fan that hates "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? Then you're probably the Pixies fan who hates "Here Comes Your Man." You snob.
12. 5. "Caribou"
Album: Come On Pilgrim
Year: 1987
"Caribou" starts off like it's going to be another gentle, swaying track à la "Here Comes Your Man," but a little before the 1:30 mark, Black Francis' blood-curdling scream cuts in and changes all that. The song is another great example of the beautiful, harsh contrasts that most of the Pixies' best work utilizes. David Bowie once said that one of the things he loved most about the Pixies was the underlying sense of humor, and although the meaning behind "Caribou" is often debated, you have to wonder if lyrics like, "This human form, Where I was born, I now repent / Caribou" is more of a tongue-in-cheek sentiment than a deep insight into existentialism.
13. 4. "Monkey Gone To Heaven"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
One of the reasons Pixies are so adored is because they never took the obvious route. They were weird, and they were proud of it, and we love them for it. Their 1989 album Doolittle was packed full of possible singles. Their choice for the lead single: "Monkey Gone To Heaven," a song about man, Earth, the environment, and religion that includes screaming, spoken verses, and guest cellists and violinists.
Producer Gil Norton explained, "Since we had under three weeks to record, most of Doolittle was a song a day, and we managed to keep to that except for 'Monkey Gone To Heaven'. It was a case of 'Oh, it would be great just to try putting some strings on that,' and because we didn't have enough time in Boston, we had to wait until we got to the Carriage House in Connecticut." They made the exception for this one and as soon as they heard it, they knew they had something special on their hands. They were right—the song put Pixies on the American charts for the first time ever.
14. 3. "Hey"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
The smoothest, sassiest, and funkiest Pixies track in existence. "Hey" is the kind of song you love in the first six seconds—Deal's bass crawls up your spine and the guitar cracks an egg over your head and oozes down to meet it, all before Francis really gets going. It's a departure from the rest of Doolittle—a bluesy rumination on sex and the emptiness it can bring. There are whores in Francis' head, at his door, and in his bed, and he greets them with a grating dissonance that makes the song ache with a soulful funk rarely found in the Pixies' discography. Even better, then, that he refuses take it too seriously, punctuating the second verse with the immortal thrusting "UH!" Deal may be the unsung hero of the track, wailing away and echoing Black in the chorus.
15. 2. "Broken Face"
Album: Surfer Rosa
Year: 1988
"Broken Face" was a sign of things to come. The song rips through it's 90-second runtime without once stopping for breath, a furious tour de force that's either talking about incest or lobotomies, or both. It is the centerpiece of Surfer Rosa, a fourth-track keystone that lets you know the rain isn't going to let up. Black spits what initially sounds like complete nonsense on top of guitars played hard enough to hear the callouses forming, complete with what would quickly become a signature wail haunting the strums underneath. You will indeed be left with no lips or tongue. Where you once had eyes, there will be only space.
16. 1. "Debaser"
Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989
What a way to kick off an album. Arguably the band's best full-length, Doolittle, starts with the lyrics, "Got me a movie, I want you to know / Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know." The movie that Black Francis was referring to was Un Chien Andalou, a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí that has one cringe-worthy scene involving a woman's eyeball being sliced open. Francis admits that he didn't put much thought into it, that he just thought it sounded cool and wanted to make a song about it.
On Doolittle, Pixies' drummer Dave Lovering told Music Radar, “We didn’t feel like we were making a masterpiece. I guess I can see that it’s a classic now. At the time of its release, I just thought of it as another Pixies album. It was the next thing we were doing.” This attitude was probably why the album felt so natural. There was no pressure to make something deep and meaningful, and the band could sing and play whatever they felt like singing and playing. 20 years later we can all agree that it's a classic album, and when you press play on that album, "Debaser" sets the tone perfectly.
