Recently it became time to start listening to the Pixies again.1For the record, I categorically reject this revisionist notion that we must always say just “Pixies” without the “the.”Today I pulled this off the shelf:

This is the only piece of Pixies vinyl I own. (Back in the day, I thriftily got both Surfer Rosa and Doolittle on cassette from other people. Then I started buying CDs.) It came out three years before a certain other band put a picture of a baby boy with his willie hanging out on their album cover. Curious, that.

This was a period of transition, after Surfer Rosa made them indie darlings and before Doolittle, their major-label debut. The label for this one was the goth-adjacent 4AD, on which the Pixies sort of fit and sort of didn’t.

There are four songs. Two are live tracks:

Both of these feature Black Francis at his shriekingest, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I heard “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” in any form; I hadn’t seen Eraserhead yet.

But the real find here is the two songs on the other side, which are the Pixies’ first recordings with their new producer, Gil Norton, who would stay in that role till the end — three years during which, according to my measurements, they were the best band in the world. As a sort of warm-up, the first thing they did together was re-record two songs from Surfer Rosa.

Indie purists love to sing the praises of Steve Albini, who “engineered” Rosa (he didn’t like the word “producer”). And sure, I love that album — it is a unique document of a unique band, and contains a bunch of incredible songs. I also have issues with it, mainly due to Albini’s love of clatter for clatter’s sake.

If anyone else out there wonders, like I do, what Surfer Rosa would have sounded like with Norton producing, we have 2/13ths of an answer on this record. First comes “Gigantic”:

And it’s hard for me to say this is better than the album version, because I’m not sure that’s possible. But it’s also great, in a slightly different way. (Some folks say “Gigantic” was the Pixies’ best song. I think this really hacked off Francis, and may have contributed to the tensions that eventually broke up the band. Another thing I wonder is, what if he had let the Pixies do Kim’s songs and they made a bunch of crazy double albums with all that material? But on the whole things worked out pretty good.)

The real revelation is “River Euphrates,” which never stood out much on Surfer Rosa. With Norton’s crisper, bassier sound, it becomes a monster. You have to play it loud though:

I wish they had done “Where Is My Mind” too. But you can’t have everything.