Archives for July 2019

Certain Songs #1577: Pixies – “All Over The World”

July 8, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Bossanova
Year: 1990

. . .

Come to think of it, it was probably a song like “All Over The World” that the Bossanova haters cited as exhibit A in their dislike of it.

For the most part, “All Over The World” is slow and steady, dominated by weird, nearly falsetto vocals from Black Francis and either a) a Francis overdub b) Kim Deal or c) David Lovering singing seemingly nonsense lyrics that always resolve back to the title.

Certain Songs #1576: Pixies – “Dig For Fire”

July 7, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Bossanova
Year: 1990

. . .

Outside of the Modern Rock — and I’m assuming the CMJ — charts, the Pixies never had much success during their initial run. And it’s a weird contradiction that their highest-charting album in the US happened to be Bossanova — which peaked at #70 — but it’s also the worst-selling record of those original four.

Which just means that Bossanova initially sold “well” because of the buzz coming off of Doolittle, but it didn’t have the legs — which is to say, reputation — of its predecessor, which actually went platinum at some point in the past 30 years.

Certain Songs #1575: Pixies – “Velouria”

July 2, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Bossanova
Year: 1990

. . .

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my favorite Pixies album.

Not only that, one of my top 10 favorite albums of the 1990s; the record that finally trampled all over whatever objections I may have had to the Pixies and turned me from a skeptic into a fan. I know that some of you die-hards are even now shaking your heads about this.

Certain Songs #1574: Pixies – “Monkey Gone to Heaven”

July 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989

. . .

Perhaps the pixieish Pixies song that ever pixied, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is a full-blown art rock anthem that somehow crams an insane amount of ideas into just less than three minutes, and while it’s not quite my favorite Pixies song, on just about any objective scale, it sure as shit is their greatest, encapsulating everything that made them unique and influential.

While a lot of bands prior to and after the Pixies used the same quiet LOUD quiet dynamic, very few of them would have ever thought to come up with a song like “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” which combined environmentalism and philosophy without being nearly as finger-waving as you’d expect a song that combined environmentalism and philosophy to be.