PIXIES Poll: The best track on Trompe le Monde

Kim's playing on the end of "Bird Dream" is really great (I got new headphones haha).

it's just PIXIES, Dennis!!1

i remember that i was disappointed by this album when it came out and didn't buy it. bossanova i got as lp as a birthday present from a friend. together with the blue aeroplanes swagger my first indie records. and i liked bossanova which i found light and sunny quite a bit. bought doolittle and surfer rosa/come on pilgrim on cd shortly afterwards. doolittle has always been my fave. i think i should relisten to trompe le monde, it seems to have aged well.

I think each of the Pixies albums could be their best, with the exception of Bossanova, which ironically was my favorite for the longest time.

The best parts of the album are sublime but there are a few songs ("Planet of Sound", "U-Mass", "Palace of the Brine", "Subbacultcha") that just don't do much for me.

Ha, I love all of those songs!

I remember seeing the 'Gouge' documentary in the late 90s, where someone like Dave Grohl presents the idea that only up to Doolittle was considered their classic period which got a big WTF from me at the time.

I wish a scan of Danni Minogue describing Planet Of Sound as "a crock of shit" in Number One magazine would show up somewhere.

Smash Hits. Enjoy. One page over her own LP is reviewed as slightly better than Electronic's.

"roooooooar"

:) Scans of pretty much every page of pretty much every issue of Smash Hits here. Found myself preferring Neil Tennant's 1984 singles reviews over sleep at 3am last night.

wow those Danni reviews are kinda fun/mostly wtf

Living Colour "sounds a bit like Paul Simon"

Thanks! Could have sworn it was Number One

Did Neil Tennant ever give The Icicle Works a bad review? Ian McNabb charmingly wished death on him on Twitter a few years ago

Besides, Alfred, I've seen others suggest that the album should have been sequenced differently.

Someone on Spectrum Culture apparently gave it a shot, shortening the album to 11 tracks. I don't think it's entirely an improvement, but opening with "Letter to Memphis" and closing with "Motorway to Roswell" is a pretty great idea. Something close to a swap of Sides A and B (save for "Letter to Memphis" and "Motorway to Roswell" which I'd keep at both ends) may be on the right track.

It's temping to cut it down to the 10 or 12 best cuts and make like a 25+ minute album as a throwback to some the super-short rock LP's of the '50s. The fact that most of the songs are so short even goes along with the concept.

(Black Francis: “A lot of the arrangements were pretty short, and Gil suggested we lengthen them...I went out, picked up a Buddy Holly record and played him one of the songs, which was about a minute and fourteen seconds. I said: ‘Gil, there you go. It doesn’t get any more classic than this rock n’ roll right here. Look how short these arrangements are.’ He decided not to fight me on that point...") FWIW, the only three Buddy Holly albums released in Holly's lifetime ran for 25:59, 24:35 and 25:06 respectively.

I absolutely never play the Pixies anymore -- if I ever did; I never warmed to them like I did the Breeders -- but this remains my go-to album.

one of my favorite album endings, actually. "Motorway to Roswell" so devastating that I need a weird coda to let the pressure off.

(and 2022 has been my year of crying to "Motorway")