Trompe Le Monde

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.