The Pixies released Doolittle

Doolittle Pixies

Released: April 17, 1989 Peak: 98 US, 8 UK, -- CN, 104 AU Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, 0.3 UK, 1.3 world (includes US and UK) Genre: alternative rock

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. Debaser (10/4/97, 23 UK, 19 DF) Tame Wave of Mutilation (24 DF) I Bleed Here Comes Your Man (6/1/89, 3 MR, 54 UK, 10 DF) Dead Monkey Gone to Heaven (3/20/89, 5 MR, 60 UK, 19 DF) Mr. Grieves Crackity Jones La La Love You No. 13 Baby There Goes My Gun Hey Silver Gouge Away Total Running Time: 38:38 The Players: Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV (aka “Black Francis”) (vocals, guitar) Kim Deal (bass, vocals, acoustic slide guitar on “Silver”) Joey Santiago (guitar, backing vocals) David Lovering (drums, vocal on “La La Love You,” bass on “Silver”)

Rating: 4.404 out of 5.00 (average of 29 ratings) Quotable: “One of those buzzed-about landmark records that traveled far on word of mouth. If you cared about rock noise in 1989, you needed to hear it.” – Tom Moon Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: The Pixies formed in Boston in 1986. They were fronted by singer Charles Thompson (aka “Black Francis”) “and anchored in every sense by bassist-vocalist Kim Deal.” TM Guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering rounded out the foursome who released their EP Come on Pilgrim in 1987 and debut album, the “brilliant but abrasive Surfer Rosa,” AM in 1988. Noisy Meets Poppy After “Surfer Rosa, the Pixies’ sound couldn’t get much more extreme” AM so on Doolittle the band “reins in the noise in favor of pop songcraft and accessibility.” AM “It’s as though the band finished touring Surfer Rosa and realized that it was taxing work to bludgeon people for an entire evening.” TM The result is “a more assured collection of songs” AD as they “find a comfortable balance between angry distortion and some of the bounciest sunshine music this side of flower power.” CQ A New Producer Steve Albini, who later worked on PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and Nirvana’s In Utero, produced Surfer Rosa and Kim wanted him for the next album but Black Francis balked. Instead, the band went with Gil Norton. His “sonic sheen adds some polish,” AM providing “a contrast to the band’s abrasive force,” CM which enhanced the band’s “loud/quiet guitar squalls” EW’12 that became “a Pixies trademark.” CM “It’s an album that grabs your attention in a way that makes you scared to look away. Few albums have ever been so exhilarating.” PM It is “eclectic and ambitious” AM with “wide-ranging moods and sounds,” AM showcasing the Pixies’ “full range of achievements and styles.” AD Influence Doolittle “became one of those buzzed-about landmark records that traveled far on word of mouth. If you cared about rock noise in 1989, you needed to hear it. That’s still true.” TM The album made the Pixies one of “the handful of bands that every ‘90s indie band worth its salt cites as an essential influence.” PK “It’s easy to see why the album made the Pixies into underground rock stars;” AM this is “a fun, freaky alternative to most other late-‘80s college rock.” AM Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain himself acknowledged the Pixies’ influence on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” 500 It became “the Old Testament of grunge rock” CM and “a rite of passage for anyone who wants to get into alt-rock.” PM Like Sonic Youth, the Pixies “completely deconstructed the pop format, twisting basic surf guitar chord progressions into wholly original new forms…The results could be brilliant, but also occasionally distancing.” PK “Black Francis’ self-described ‘stream of unconsciousness’ rants” 500 grew into “tighter songwriting [that] focuses the group’s attack” AM but still display “enough killer guitar hooks and melodicism to keep it anchored.” PK The Songs: Here’s some insight into each of the individual songs on the album. “Debaser” Debaser “is a nonstop barrage of lyrical imagery, tempo changes, and insane riffage, more or less the perfect Pixies track.” PK It “is the quintessential sound of The Pixies in full-flight, the one song that springs to the mind of many fans if forced to choose just one song to represent the group.” AD “Santiago has said that this is the best single-song distillation of the Pixies experience.” TM This “playfully diabolical power pop” CQ is signicant not just in the Pixies’ catalog but in its influence on Kurt Cobain. His love of the Pixies and their loud-soft dynamic supposedly led to his efforts to replicate their sound with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” PK . It is inspired by Luis Bunuel’s 1929 French silent film, the classic surrealist short Un Chien Andalou he co-wrote with Salvador Dali. Thompson said the aim of the movie was “to debase morality. To debase standards of art.” BS-78 It is the closest Thompson has come to a manifesto. BS-78 “Tame” Tame finds “Black Francis whispering about how the woman that fascinates the song’s protagonist has ‘got hips like Cinderella’ – but once he’s screaming…above razor sharp guitar the title is a misnomer.” CM “it’s a wonder he could even speak after recording it.” AD The song’s genius is in the decision to “exploit the contrast between verse and chorus. The former usually builds up to the latter, as tension and release. Why not exaggerate that difference and make a whispered leap up to an Olympian firestorm, only to plunge back down in an instant?” BS-81 Santiago “engaged in a bit of one-upmanship. ‘That whole song is three chords, ‘he says. ‘And I was pretty proud of the fact that, if you guys are playing three chords, well I’m gonna play one. So I just played one. One chord.” BS-82 “Wave of Mutilation” Wave of Mutilation is the group’s “surfy ode to driving a car into the sea.” AM “It tells of a suicide gone wonderfully right;” BS-85 ”the lyrics are a fantasy of the afterlife as an underwater pleasureland.” BS-82 It sets up “one of the key themes of Doolittle: willful submersion into the sea, that great evolutionary toilet bowl.” BS-85 “I Bleed” “Wave of Mutilation” and I Bleed “really cook while staying within the confines of traditional rock songs.” PK It “opens with very deep bass notes [before] Joey’s guitar arrives.” AD “The lyrics and vocal performance are both wonderful and inspired.” AD The song “adheres more closely than any other song on the album to the Surrealist MO” BS-86 with its “devilish wordplay and contrasting imagery.” BS-86 Thompson “sing-speaks his way through the rhyme, teasing out each syllable to emphasize sound over sense.” BS-87 “Deal echoes his vocal in a hollow and repetitive two-note pattern. The result is closer to goth-rock than anything else in the Pixies repertoire.” BS-87 “Here Comes Your Man” The single Here Comes Your Man is “irresistible,” AM “straightforward jangly” PK and “deceptively jolly.” PM “Had The Pixies had enough of a public profile at the time, this could have been a huge hit for them.” AD “Though part of the Charles Thompson songbook from the beginning, it never quite fit with the Pixies’ sound, and despite the fact that it became one of its only songs to approach the level of a hit, the band long avoided playing it live.” BS-88 The band seemed to subscribe to the “vintage college-rock ‘tude [that] the hit, the pop song, shouldbe avoided as inauthentic.” BB-91 Thompson says, “It’s a sweet little chord progression thing that I wrote when I was like fourteen or fifteen.” BS-88 It became one of the band’s earliest recordings, surfacing during their 1987 Purple Tape sessions and bearing some resemblance to early R.E.M. BS-88 It was rejected for their 1987 Come on Pilgrim EP as “too plain, too unexciting.” BS-88 The band recorded it again in May 1988, but it failed to make their debut album, Surfer Rosa. BS-88 “Dead” Doolittle’s most ferocious moments, like” AM “the rumbling, primal Dead,” CM “are more stylized than the group’s past outbursts.” AM This is “a visceral retelling of David and Bathsheba’s affair,” AM an “ingenious psychological reading” BS-94 of the Old Testament story. Thompson describes it as a story of a king so smitten by this woman’s beauty that he sends his thugs to get her. When she gets pregnant, he sends her military-commander husband to battle where he gets killed. However, the king spirals downward when the baby is stillborn. BS-93 “Monkey Gone to Heaven” “The Pixies’ arty, noisy weirdness mix with just enough hooks to produce gleefully demented singles” AM such as Monkey Gone to Heaven. This is “relatively mainstream college pop-rock,” PK “a slick, mid-tempo ballad featuring a string section and suave, Lou Reed-y vocals.” BS-95 “This is a truly beautiful song.” AD It is also “one of the band’s biggest curveballs,” BS-96 a bizarre tale of “an environmental disaster [that] allows for humanity’s obliteration of a deity.” CM Another interpretation suggests the opposite. “No matter who he has crushed and burnt and destroyed, man is low on the scale, down there below Satan. God is uncrushable, and man is basically a monkey.” BS-97 Musically, Lovering “keeps a spare beat with a cold ‘English’ snare, and Black Francis narrates in the quietest, most childlike voice we have heard from him.” BS-98 There’s also “has a wall of amplified sludge that comes in and out of the picture.” BS-98 “Those four ugly chords [are] warped in a way only Joey Sanitago can warp a guitar chord.” BS-98 “Mr. Grieves” “The strangely theatrical Mr. Grieves” AM features “a little Kinks’ ‘Dead End Street’ descending bass line, mixed in with a single riff and a half laughing, half stuttering vocal. It becomes another distinctive Pixies song introduction. Happily, the rest of the song is even better with sparkling guitars and another beautiful yet powerful vocal performance.” AD The song “might be a stompy cabaret number, but it is the most cynical song on Doolittle.” BS-101 Lyrically, the songs paints “a cold, detailed picture of the death of mankind, one straight out of a 1980s nuclear-apocalypse flick.” BS-100 “Crackity Jones” Crackity Jones is “the fastest, loudest, and most musically aggressive song on Doolittle,” BS-102 supported by “demented guitars and trashing exactly when the album needed it.” AD It is “one of the Pixies’ punkiest songs, with a Tommy Ramone beat seat at a frantic 150 clicks per minute.” BS-103 It features drummer Dave Lovering singing and while “he does struggle slightly with the vocals…his voice is so deep and crooning.” AD The song is “about a crazy roommate Francis had in Puerto Rico” AM when he was there for a six-month college study trip. BS-102 It’s “hilariously funny.” AD “La La Love You” There’s also “the sweetly surreal love song La La Love You.” AM “It is the jokiest, cutest, dumbest song on the album.” BS-104 Thompson said, “In a vague way it’s mocking popular music.” BS-105 “It’s just mimicking a really bad 1950s song.” BS-104 “Bass, drums, and acoustic guitar play it straight, while Joey Santiago does a smartass wink followed by various Martian interpolations of surf chords.” BS-105 “To indicate a spoof, Thompson had the drummer sing it. Turns out Lovering was perfect for the part – he’s a cheesy crooner who can do a Rick Astley just as good as Rick Astley.” BS-105 “No. 13 Baby” No. 13 Baby “isn’t as startling a song as much else of what’s here, but the strummed guitar and Charles off-in-the-distance vocal through the quieter sections are a joy all the same. It's still a mighty fine song…with some entertaining Joey guitar notable in particular.” AD Thompson “gives the whole second half of the song – almost two full minutes – to a trancelike, erotic groove, a state of pure pleasure that is unique in the Pixies songbook.” BS-108 “There Goes My Gun” “There are still plenty of weird, abrasive vignettes” AM such as “the blankly psychotic There Goes My Gun.” AM It is “a throwback structurally to Surfer Rosa or Come on Pilgrim.” AD “Kim sounds wonderful here on bass and vocals, and each group member takes a turn to sing a line of the lyric, ‘friend or foe,’ which is fun” AD It is “a slow little surf ditty that is under two minutes in length and contains just ten words of lyrics.” BS-109 It’s one of Thompson’s “finest moments as a minimalist.” BS-109 Even with so few words, the song comes across as a cautionary tale of a soldier who hears a noise and frantically shoots when it fails to identify itself as friend or foe. The listener is left with the impression that someone is killed, maybe even the narrator. BS-110 “Hey” Like “Here Comes Your Man,” this is a song that “had been in the band’s repertoire from the beginning.” BS-112 “It had been a central part of the live set since at least early ’88.” BS-112 This and “Monkey Gone to Heaven” “stretch Francis’ lyrical horizons” AM making for the “Pixies’ versions of message songs and romantic ballads.” AM Hey “opens with a spine chillingly beautiful vocal. Equally as beautiful restrained guitars come in.” AD It is “a rambling paragraph of sexual anxiety that is a bravura performance by Thompson and a moment of great finesse by the whole band.” BS-113 Thompson said the song was “to some degree inspired by thoughts of his mother and father, particularly in their wild, younger years. They grew older and split up, though they remained forever bound by their connection to their son.” BS-114 “Silver” The Pixies “expand their range on the brooding, wannabe spaghetti western theme Silver.” AM It is “a harmony vocal number with a folky arrangement” BS-115 that “features a dual lead vocal from Kim and Frank as well as slide guitar which works astonishing well in giving the song a truly timeless feel.” AD “The song derives its only percussion from a thunderclap bass drum.” BS-116 It is a musical oddity on the album, and one of the only two titles in the Pixies catalog credited to both Thompson and Deal.” BS-115 Thompson viewed it as “a mere collaborative scrap” BS-115 with “throwaway and ambiguous” BS-115 lyrics “that made it onto the album as an afterthought.” BS-115 “Gouge Away” With its “frantic, relentless energy” PM “the nihilistic finale Gouge Away” AM “finishes things off with…stupendous vocal screaming.” AD “If Doolittle had to begin with ‘Debaser,’ it could only end with ‘Gouge Away.’” BS-117 “It’s another textbook Pixies song, a flawless demonstration of style and vision…where the album’s biggest themes – sex, death, defiance, God – collide resulting in a big, crushing, everybody-dies-in the-end collapse.” BS-117 It “sets the biblical narrative of Samson and Delilah to a menacing bassline.” CM “The story mingles sex and politics on a small scale with gigantic divine retribution, as Samson the seduced and ruined becomes Samson the instrument of God’s fury.” BS-118 It is “a powerful song to close an utterly listenable album that really does have it all.” AD

Resources: AM AllMusic.com review by Heather Phares CQ Consequence.net (9/12/2022). “The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time” CM Toby Creswell & Craig Mathieson (2012). 100 Best Albums of All Time. Hardie Grant Books. Page 74. AD Adrian Denning (3/30/2007). “Adrian’s Top 100 Albums, So Far” EW’12 Entertainment Weekly (9/27/2012). “Top 100 Albums” TM Tom Moon (2008). 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. Workman Publishing Company, Inc.: New York, NY. PM PasteMagazine.com (6/3/2024). “The 300 Greatest Albums of All Time” PK Pop Kulcher/Marc Fagel Greatest Rock & Roll Albums of All Time 500 Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time BS Ben Sisario (2006). 33 1/3: Doolittle Bloomsbury: New York. Related DMDB Pages: First posted 4/18/2012; last updated 3/12/2025.