What is a B-side to a band as delightfully peculiar as Pixies? What happens when you flip over the group who influenced a whole generation of young punks with their loud-quiet-loud aesthetic while surfing their own boldly idiosyncratic gamma wave?
Consider Complete B-Sides: 1988-97, originally released in 2001 and now getting a remaster as part of the band’s 40th anniversary celebrations. On its evidence, the Pixies B-side is a place for dazzling tunes, ferocious power, tender emotion, vocal interplay, topsy-turvy songwriting, and the odd cover version—not unlike the band’s classic albums, really, although the tiniest bit freer, with the deviance cranked up a notch as Pixies let their hair down.
More importantly, a Pixies B-side is (generally) not a place where standards fall, as shown over the 25 songs on this album, taken from Pixies singles from “Gigantic” in 1988 to “Debaser (Live)” in 1997. Two of the songs here—the creepily cosmic “Into the White” and aching Neil Young cover “Winterlong”—actually feature on the band’s 2004 best-of compilation, and there is no reason why a good half dozen more tracks from B-Sides couldn’t do the same. (I’ll go for “River Euphrates,” “Manta Ray,” “Weird at My School,” “Dancing the Manta Ray,” “Santo,” and “Build High.” You may have your own.)
Like any great indie B-side collection,Complete B-Sides is an alternative stroll through Pixies’ best moves or a Through the Looking-Glass greatest hits. Everything you could ever want from Pixies is here—just not quite in the places you expected.
Want guitar-wielding, huge-chorus-screaming Pixies à la “Debaser”? Try “River Euphrates,” a full-bodied and swaggering re-recording of the Surfer Rosa track with producer Gil Norton. Tender pop Pixies with just the right amount of grit? Lend an aquatic ear to “Manta Ray.” Angular, dramatic, and lopsided Pixies, with a dash of Spanish salsa? “Santo” has it all. “Weird At My School,” originally released as a B-side to “Monkey Gone To Heaven,” is a lot like the classic “Vamos” in its frantic rockabilly scramble. But it adds the slightest edge of improbable musical theater with its rambunctious hits punctuating the chorus and an oom-pah-ish bridge. “Build High” is full-on cowpunk Pixies, like “Crackity Jones” with a bone-dry sense of humour. Sometimes the mirroring is even more literal: “Wave of Mutilation” appears here as “Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)”—a slowed down, twanged-up and very charming take on the Doolittle classic.
Fans of Pixies’ oddball cover versions are also well served by Complete B-Sides. The band ratchet up the nauseous horror of Eraserhead’s “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song),” inject The Yardbirds’ “Evil Hearted You” with telenovela passion, and remodel the theme tune from a notorious ’80s video game into a surf punk swirl on “Theme From Narc.” Pixies’ take on “Winterlong” is already an anthem, replacing the trundling Neil Young original in the hearts of a generation of alternative music fans. But the band’s cover of Young’s 1968 song “I’ve Been Waiting for You” is lesser known yet almost as strong, thanks to a magically understated vocal from Kim Deal.
To the original Complete B-Sides, the re-issue adds six live tracks, recorded in 1989 and 1991. These songs sound, well, gigantic, evidence of a band at its stage-crushing, imperial-phase best, with Joey Santiago’s guitar heroics savagely ramped up, Frank Black in awesome voice, and Kim Deal and David Lovering operating the fantastically precise rhythm section on which the madness rests. The live version of “Planet of Sound,” recorded at the band’s June 1991 Brixton Academy gig, is like psychedelia on beef steroids, while “Tame” is a fire-ball tearing across the darkened sky.
Admittedly, the impact of these six songs is dampened by the eye-watering volume of Pixies releases over the past decade, with live albums, in particular, being launched in droves. And yet Complete B-Sides deserves to be lovingly savored, and this re-issue is an upgrade for a vital piece of the Pixies jigsaw. Freed from the bright lights of the A-side, Pixies are more tender, strange, and unsettling; they are, in fact, arguably more Pixies in their flip-side freedom, four eternally loveable weirdos with one foot in the punk gutter and one eye way out in the oddball universe of the avant-garde, looking for clues.
