Certain Songs

Certain Songs #1582: PJ Harvey – “Down By The Water”

July 14, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: To Bring You My Love
Year: 1995

. . .

Occasionally, two seemingly irreconcilable things can be true at the same time: I can recognize that an artist is a true and utter original, and that everything they release is worth my time, but I don’t always love everything they do.

And so it is with Polly Jean Harvey, who has released a couple records that I well and truly adore, while remaining indifferent to much of the rest of her catalog.

Certain Songs #1581: Pixies – “Distance Equals Rate Times Time”

July 12, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Trompe Le Monde
Year: 1991

. . .

This is my favorite Pixies song, encapsulating everything I absolutely love about them in a snappy 1:24, making it not just the shortest Pixies song I’m writing about, but one of the shortest of all of the Certain Songs, period.

But that’s OK: “Distance Equals Rate Times Time” knows that song length is relative and crams more into its short running length than most songs would in quadruple the time.

Certain Songs #1580: Pixies – “Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons”

July 11, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Trompe Le Monde
Year: 1991

. . .

So I started 1991 by buying my first Pixies album — Bossanova, remember? — in January, and by the end of the year had digested their entire catalog. So really, the only thing left was to see them in concert.

Which I did, at the Warfield in San Francisco, just a few days before Christmas, 1991, and it goes to where my head was at that point in my life that I have almost no memory of how I got tickets or even who I went with. I seem to recall that it was a last-second thing, but that’s about it. Even my journal was no help; at the time I noted only that I went and that I was a bit underwhelmed.

Certain Songs #1579: Pixies – “Trompe Le Monde”

July 10, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Trompe Le Monde
Year: 1991

Strange as it may seem, Trompe Le Monde is the only Pixies album I purchased right after it came out, as it showed up during that insane last third of 1991 where so many of my favorite records came out, but after being bowled over by Bossanova and then Doolittle, I listened to Trompe Le Monde as much as any of them, sitting out on the porch of my Tower District apartment sipping a pre-drinking drink.

And why not? At this point, the Pixies were just cruising. Like its two immediate predecessors, nearly every single song on Trompe Le Monde rewarded repeated listening with hidden depths, starting with the opening title track, the third straight fastball to open a Pixies record.

Certain Songs #1578: Pixies – “The Happening”

July 9, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Bossanova
Year: 1990

. . .

As some of you know, perhaps our favorite category here at Certain Songs are songs about SPACE!!

And while — technically — the happening described in “The Happening” happens on Earth, it is about spacepeople, so close enough for me!

One of my favorite drives is along Highway 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, because the Mojave Desert is huge, weird and ever-changing. And while over the years some of the weirdness has been lost — good-bye Rock-a-Hula Water Park; hello outlet malls in Barstow — there’s still plenty of strangeness about it.

And, of course, aliens!!

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 top 5 my 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.

Certain Songs #1573: Pixies – “Wave of Mutilation”

June 30, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Doolittle
Year: 1989

. . .

Had the Pixies decided to title their second album More Songs About Water and Death, I’m guessing that nobody would have even batted an eye, as many of their songs are about one or the other, and quite usually both. Or at least many of their songs that I truly loved, like “Wave of Mutilation,” a song so key to the Pixies legend that they recorded two versions of it.

One of the versions was slow and dreamy and they called it the “U.K. Surf” version, and while it was relegated to a b-side, they often pulled it out for concerts. But of course, I preferred the version that ended up on More Songs About Water and Death, because it was faster and noisier while still retaining both its essential prettiness and essential weirdness.