Picture this. Charles Michael Thompson IV, a stocky, California transplant with cropped hair now living in Beantown, is sitting in a studio with a little guitar and a voice of both gods and demons. He's going by the name of Black Francis, purportedly because his parents ended up drowning a brother by that name (don't believe it). He is positively warped, fixated on sex, death, mutilation and religion. He has hung a sign in the control room that says "DEATH TO THE PIXIES," the Pixies being the name of his band. He's nervous that he hasn't memorized the words to a new song, Levitate Me. And then, for the next few minutes, you hear his unhinged voice pouring out of the little room, his guitar strumming at hyper speed, the little red light of RECORD illuminating the control room to his side.

Now, when you think of pixies, you probably think of little sprites like Tinkerbell flitting from flower to flower. You think of smiling little blonde things resting on your palm, wiping their mouths clean of nectar. You do not think of songs that scream of being reborn as a Caribou (track 1) as repentance for a past life of ills. You do not think of impish little things busting through two songs on stuttery, freaky backdrops in a borrowed Spanish learned from a semester in Puerto Rico (tracks 2 and 3, Vamos -- with a line hoping "your sons are well-hung" -- and Isla de Encanta).

A band with the pretty, feminine, coy title of the Pixies should not launch into a song about a woman killing her lover "just rotting in stupid bliss" on Ed is Dead. Straight on into a song about masturbating to head-images of your sister (Holiday Song). A contemporary Biblical retelling of Nimrod through the concert-revving line "You are the son of incestuous union" (Nimrod's Son). BS about college life, where a girl sticks her tongue in your ear if you like Lou Reed, and believes that "politics go so good with beer" (I've Been Tired).

And finally, having raced through mutations of punk, rock, rockabilly, metal, pop and country, you do not finish off an E.P. with a song which utilizes the same frantic strummed note throughout each verse, begging to be levitated from earth in the verses, giving a sly reading of a Christian standard by leering out "Come on pilgrim, you KNOW he loves you!" on Levitate Me.

In a way, this e.p. is even more essential than the Pixies proper first album Surfer Rosa. Come on Pilgrim is zero filler. It's demo recordings, done so well that eight of them were released as this debut e.p. with no sweetening. The music and lyrics come at you and do not let up until eight songs have passed, all the more corrupted and enriched for it. The Pixies shouldn't work. It's Black Francis, a stocky, regular looking guy, who would later on become obsessed with aliens. His roommate from U-Mass Joey Santiago on guitar. A woman who answered an ad to join the band which read "Must love Peter Paul and Mary and Husker Du," and went by the name of Mrs. John Murphy instead of her given name Kim Deal (later of the Breeders). She didn't even know how to play bass when she joined. And David Lovering, a skirtchaser and drummer of no renown then.

And yet, put these people together, and you get the most twisted, dark, strange, beautiful, effed-up music to have ever existed. This was the second American band that 4AD signed (after Throwing Muses), and arguably the better of the two. Black Francis will sing in an affected, whiny voice at one point, let loose the most unhinged screaming and bellowing this side of '80s Tom Waits the next. Kim Deal adds warm, sexy harmonies and basslines that stick to the basics, while bringing a whole new idea to what a bass can do to harmonize a song. Joey Santiago is a guitar god, as at ease with simple riffs as with jaw-dropping solos that harness noise and melody together into a cohesive new and bizarre form. And David admits on a b-side that he has a strange fixation with Debbie Gibson.

It shouldn't work. And yet it does. They pioneered the loud-soft dynamic that Nirvana would later take to worldwide success. They're covered by bands as wide ranging as Weezer, Papa Roach and David Bowie. Go back to the source. See what this band could do with the simplest of means, and the most darkest and blankest of obsessions, sex and death.

Long live the Pixies. Death to the Pixies.


Recommended: Yes