The first half starts off strong, and while it fades after the first two tracks ("Isla De Encanta" starts off with a sorta Spanish Ramones thing before turning into Spanish hardcore punk, and while I like the main riff there's not a lot to the song beyond it, and "Ed is Dead" is kind of a generic mid-tempo song that wastes some nice guitar and bass parts), the first two tracks are strong enough that I can forgive this. The opening "Caribou" starts with a gentle wash of surf-guitar sounds before turning into a pop-ballad waltz, with Francis singing the line "Cariboooooooooooooooooooooou Cariboooooooooooooooooooooo" in an absolutely lovely high-pitched voice (before immediately shifting into noisy screaming that somehow came from the same vocal chords, and I'm impressed by the ability to switch so gracefully), and it's a total winner of an opener. "Vamos" (which would also appear in a different form on Surfer Rosa) is a way better exercise in Spanish-influenced punk than "Isla De Encanta," pairing a fascinating bassline with squacking guitar lines (over an insistent rhythm that never becomes boring) while Francis puts all of his vocal eccentricities on display in a single song. As often happens with these kinds of songs, it's hard for me to conjure up longer descriptions than ones like this, but let me assure you, these two songs should be heard by everybody.

The second half, then, is all winners. "The Holiday Song" is built around a magnificent and well-produced guitar line that always distracts me from how Francis is singing about incest, and "Nimrod's Son" (about the Biblical figure, and yes, there's more incest involved here) has another nice recurring riff interspersed with the Spanish-style acoustic guitar (but with a dark skiffle / Buddy Holly feel to it) and the frantic vocals, and they're both a blast when on. "I've Been Tired" makes me laugh every time it comes on (the song turns more conventional, but the first minute or so is basically Francis telling a hilarious story in a falsetto over a beat, and I can promise you that the line "losing my penis to a whore with disease" will never come in a funnier context than this), but it's not a joke song per se, and when the "I'VE BEEN TIRED" chorus screams emerge followed by those guitar lines, I'm all the way in. And finally, "Levitate Me" (about reincarnation!) has the most memorable vocal melody in the bunch, and it's nearly impossible for me not to sing along with the chorus and the parts immediately leading up to it. Plus, it has great details like the frantic tense guitar (playing the same note quickly and oh I wish it would just go somewhere already) underpinning the verses in parts; these are the sorts of things that only a band that really knows what it's doing will come up with to flesh out the sound.

The easiest way to get this EP is as part of a deluxe edition of Surfer Rosa, but as mentioned before, it should be thought of as something more than just a set of bonus tracks. All in all, this might actually be the best place to start, rather than with the more acclaimed Surfer Rosa or Doolittle; it's a great (and brief!) way to wade into the band, and if you can't get into it after 3 or 4 listens, then Pixies might not be for you. This isn't my favorite release from the band, but it was definitely my gateway into their general sound, and I imagine this might hold for others as well.

After the surprising success of the Come on Pilgrim EP, the band eventually hooked up with producer Steve Albini, who didn't think much of the band but nonetheless did a great job for them, especially in the drum sound (which is powerful in a way that sounds like the best aspects of typical 70s drum sounds but updated for the late 80s, without any traits that make it sound like it was recorded in 1988). The production immediately establishes itself as a featured part of the album in the opening "Bone Machine," which takes a handful of good Fall-like riffs, mixes them with Francis doing one of his many Mark E Smith imitations but also with Francis and Deal occasionally singing the tiniest wisp of a chorus, and somehow manages to turn this into a classic not suggested by any of the single elements. This continues into the next track, "Break My Body," where part of my mind wants to think "if only they gave these great and varied guitar parts and great drum sound a clearly strong vocal melody to match," but where the rest of my mind ends up marveling at how they managed to squeeze so much power out of Francis and Deal singing "BREAK MY BODY / HOLD MY BONES / HOLD MY BONES" in the chorus. And so on.

This isn't necessarily an album where I'll want to cover every song, as there are only so many ways I can think to say something along the lines of "I don't entirely understand how they made something so interesting out of this," but I do have some favorites that have emerged and that I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention. "Something Against You" starts off with a peppy guitar part played on an instrument that sounds so warped and broken that including it on the album sounds like a mistake, but it ends up serving as a perfect lead-in to a blast of happy pop-punk (albeit with vocals that sound like a dog trying to eat a microphone) that ends up feeling like an extended introduction to the 1:30 "Broken Face," which is a nearly perfect punk song with Francis sounding like he's hiccupping when he "sings" the title. The 3:55 "Gigantic" might have been the closest thing to a hit from this album, but "Cactus" (the source of this page's tagline) should have been the big hit, both because of how catchy and intense it is and because of the great decision to spell "P-I-X-I-E-S" in the background (Kim Deal thought it was dumb and didn't participate, but I think it's a great nod to the glam-rock influence on the song). At least David Bowie thought it was cool (he covered it on the 2002 album Heathen and spelled D-A-V-I-D when he did it).

Of the remaining songs, "Tony's Theme" is one of the standouts for me, even if it feels underwritten, and I love it for how much they lean into how silly it is while adorning it with instrumental backing that absolutely sounds like a late-80s version of the 60s Batman theme. "Vamos" (from the Come on Pilgrim EP) makes an appearance here, this time blown up into a whopping 4:18, and the decision to lengthen the song from a relatively taut 2:53 to this new length somehow doesn't result in the song feeling flabby, which I respect. And finally, the closing "Brick is Red" feels initially like the band might have made the decision to close the album with an interesting low-key guitar-heavy instrumental, and while the vocals do come in eventually, they're low-key enough that I'm able to continue to focus on the guitars and drums, and I don't mind that at all.

Not everything on here is individually masterful, but several individual songs here are terrific, and more importantly this album really works as an album. For instance, the decision on the part of the band (against the wishes of Albini) to incoporate bits of studio banter may not specifically improve any of the songs the banter is attached to, but it does help contribute to the chaotic, somewhat surreal feel of the album as a whole, in which ideas and sounds come in and out more in accordance with dream logic than with conscious logic. This is not necessarily an album I would expect just anybody to like (it's certainly not one I liked for the longest time), but it's definitely an experience that merits better than a casual toss-off listen. If nothing else, I can definitely see why this eventually appealed to so many people and helped shape the approach of so many of the artists that helped make the 90s what it was, for better or worse.

These are the major highlights of the album and almost certainly the best known songs of the album, but the album has a lot of other peaks, even if I definitely feel like the album somewhat runs out of steam by the end (with the exception of "Silver," the album's penultimate track and one that sounds like Pixies crossed with a Rolling Stones blues number circa Sticky Fingers and filtered through a film score from Enrico Morricone). "Debaser" is followed by a strong combo of "Tame" (a 2-minute memorable rocker with a great bassline that alternates between a whispered verse and a screaming noisy chorus) and "Wave of Mutilation" (a 2-minute anthemic pop-rocker with thick satisfying guitars and a warm and memorable chorus to match the unsettling lyrics), and while I don't quite love the following "I Bleed" (I don't like the clashing vocals here as much as I sometimes do with Pixies songs), at least it has another good bass part and fascinating noisy squacking guitars. "Dead" is the most unlikely re-telling of the David/Bathsheba/Uriah saga one can imagine, and it rules, with more great noisy guitars over a solid rhythm section while Francis sorta-sings lines like "Uriah hit the crapper, the crapper" to hilarious effect. "La La Love You" is a hilarious piss-take on surf-rock love songs (a genre I never knew I needed to hear parodied until this one), with Lovering (not Francis) singing "All I'm sayin' pretty baby / La la love you don't mean maybe" in a way that cracks me up every time while he also lays down his most interesting drum pattern of the album, and the following "No.13 Baby" (about a woman who has that number tattooed in a particular spot) is a nice enough song that becomes way more interesting in the last 2 minutes (this one actually lasts almost 4 minutes in total) when the band allows itself to stretch out, with Santiago leading the way admirably.

Elsewhere, "Mr. Grieves" starts off a little slow as a minimal reggae-ish number but picks up when it shifts into something that reminds me a bit of the upbeat sections of "Hateful" by The Clash, but the following "Crackity Jones," all 1:24 of it, is a blast of punk-ish energy (with a Spanish tinge) along the lines of something from Surfer Rosa, and while my brain initially treated these tracks as somewhat of a dead spot on the album, I definitely like them more now than I used to. "Hey" is a quieter one that also didn't catch my attention initially (and I have to confess that I initially thought the lyrics were about "Chang and Ang" and felt pretty stupid when I actually looked them up), and I still don't love it, but I do like it, especially the build in intensity once Francis starts singing "we're chained" repeatedly. At least the closing "Gouge Away" is a strong closer, even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of the best songs on the album; it's a return to the basic formula of "strong rhythm section" + "great lead guitar sound playing interesting lines" + "Francis bellowing memorable nonsense" that represents the band at its quintessential best, and I'm glad they ended on this note.

Maybe I don't like this album quite as much as the general consensus does, but I'm not that far off either, and I'd happily recommend it to anybody. This album and this band ended up inspiring a lot of music and a lot of artists that I don't tend to go out of my way to hear, but there's so much inspiration here, both in terms of sonic palette and in terms of their sense of melody and harmony, that I can't help but respect and enjoy the hell out of this album. In an ideal world, younger me would have been able to assimilate this a lot more easily, but I'm glad I got to this point eventually.

The most curious thing about the album's overall construction is that it starts and finishes in somewhat mirror fashion. The beginning and ending tracks are essentially both instrumental (the latter only has a single short verse but is dominated in the vocals by how the title is sung in a way that sounds more like a production effect than anything else), and both the opening "Cecilia Ann" (a cosmic surf instrumental nominally written by The Surftones, but actually written by Steve Hoffman, a famous recording engineer whose name later became attached to a prominent online forum for music lovers and audiophiles) and the closing "Havalina" are very effective ("Cecilia Ann" basically sounds like The Shadows as performed by a race of god-like alien overlords, while "Havalina" has a dreamy guitar-heavy minimalism that I love a lot). The odd thing about the instrumentals, though, is that the album still sounds complete (if inferior) without them. The "opening" screamy "Rock Music" isn't necessarily good per se, but it makes a statement for sure, even if that statement is largely "we're going to try and create a more primal version of a Surfer Rosa song but with incongruous production" (the album essentially sounds like a warm-up and I'm kinda surprised that the band included it). Likewise, the penultimate "Stormy Weather" could have made a great album closer, a strangely heartwarming mid-tempo crawler (except for a brief stretch in the middle where it speeds up a bit) that, with a slightly different arrangement, could have been something you'd imagine people singing together in a bar after a successful sporting event. This symmetry was clearly not accidental, and in a certain sense it suggests the band was trying to pull off the traditional "great album" framework of starting/stopping on a high note and shoving the weaker material into the middle (that the material at the start and end of the album isn't good enough to justify this conceit is a separate matter).

That leaves ten tracks in the middle, and while some of them are quite good, I find them underwhelming as a whole. I suppose my favorite of the bunch is "Dig for Fire," which Francis vaguely modeled after Talking Heads and built around some great rhythm guitar weaving around a steady beat with a punchy chorus (sorta?) emerging periodically, but I also quite like the anthemic (and theremin-heavy!) "Velouria" and the noisy/punchy/catchy 1:17 "Alison" (which is apparently a tribute to Mose Allison, the famous jazz musician) that appears early on. "Down to the Well" has an especially notable primary guitar line that feels like a dwindling fuse that sets off noisier sections, which I really enjoy, and, uh, I guess I definitely like "Hang Wire," which in typical Pixies fashion goes from gentler (relatively, of course) verse instrumentation to more discordant (both in instrumentation and in how Francis sings) parts. Beyond that, though, there's a lot that I kinda sorta enjoy but not as much as I'd like to, whether because it sounds like older material awkwardly rammed into production that doesn't fit it ("Is She Weird"), or because it's stretched out when it doesn't really deserve it (the moderately interesting and memorable "All Over the World" which, neat instrumental bits notwithstanding, absolutely should not exceed 5 minutes), or because of many other reasons.

For all of my hemming and hawing over this album (and believe me, I listened to this album a lot before writing this), there's continually a part of me that thinks that, if I just gave this one or two more listens, it would all click and I'd like this about as much as the preceding albums, but there comes a point where I just have to abandon this hope. This is by no means a bad album, and I don't hold it against the band in the abstract for making a clear effort to keep themselves from repeating the approach of what they had done to this point, but I also wish that the same cohesion that had allowed the band to reach its previous heights had been present here as well. A fan of Surfer Rosa and Doolittle should probably buy this, but if somebody likes those albums but considers this a failure I wouldn't push back on that at all.

If I had to pick one song from this album as a standout, the most obvious choice would be "Letter to Memphis," a choice that shouldn't be controversial; it has a very warm and inviting vocal melody capped by the repeated "trying to get to you," it's full of great textures that flesh out the main chord sequence, and at 2:40 it gets in and out before it even remotely has a chance to get boring. While "Letter" is the clear peak, though, this album has a pretty solid second-tier, such as with the noisy "Planet of Sound" that has a great driving riff overlaid with vocals with a neat spacey effect while Francis sings about a Martian, or "Alec Eiffel," a song about the designer of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty filled with great lead guitar harmonies over an interesting mix of guitar and keyboard textures. "U-Mass" is another relatively famous one from the album, with Francis mocking college intellectuals with a vocal part that incessantly does call-and-response with a noisy guitar until he yells "It's educational!!" over the chorus, and while I don't think it's quite great, I enjoy it quite a bit. "Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons" (about a bird dreaming about flying near the biggest mountain on Mars and in our solar system) has an appropriately epic set of soaring chorus sequences that grow out of initially low-key guitar and keyboard parts, and the effect is impressive. And finally, I enjoy the hell out of "Motorway to Roswell," which manages to sound simultaneously like Pixies, late-period Kinks (and not bad late-period Kinks either), and the Beach Boys (what else would you call the backing vocals starting around 3:00?) while featuring more fun UFO-related lyrics and lovely keyboard tinklings in the end that sound perfectly at home with the rest of the song.

There are, of course, many other songs, and for the most part I have even more trouble coming up with things to say about them than I do with Pixies songs in general. Try as I might, I can't think of anything to say about the title track other than "this is brisk and poppy and I like it," or about "The Sad Punk" other than "this is noisy and angry and I like it," or about the band's cover of "Head On" other than "this sounds like a good cover, I think I've heard the original Jesus and Mary Chain song once," and so on. This kind of album and sound just doesn't fall squarely into my comfort zone either as a listener or as somebody trying to write about music, but just because I can't find the words to describe why I think something is good doesn't mean I think it's bad. Unlike with Bossanova, where I kept listening over and over in the hope that the next listen would be the one where I'd like it just a little bit more but never got there, this one was an album that clearly improved for me by the 4th or 5th listen, and while it didn't really improve thereafter, it says something to me that it did eventually break through somewhat. In short, this might be the least necessary Pixies album of the initial (pre-reunion) stretch of the band, but it's still very enjoyable, and I can absolutely envision a situation where somebody more naturally inclined towards 90s music than I am would find this an absolute blast. It's kind of a shame that the band broke up just as their influence (from their earlier albums) was about to push so many acts into the mainstream, and it's kind of curious that their last album of this period doesn't really sound that much like the music they influenced with their earlier albums, but they still went out on a very solid note.

The album starts and finishes with its biggest surprises: the opener converts "Wild Honey Pie" (yup, the goofy throwaway from The Beatles) into a 2-minute screamy punk-rocker, and it rules, as does the closing "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)," originally found in the soundtrack for the David Lynch film "Eraserhead" (this song had been part of the band's original demo tape and was a regular part of their live shows). Beyond those, well, it's basically a compilation of some of the band's best songs, done in a slightly different context than I'm typically used to, and if you like Pixies you're into these kinds of collections from the BBC, you'll enjoy the hell out of this. I'm not necessarily sure I'd slot any of the performances here as clearly above their studio counterparts, but none of them are worse either, and most importantly the performances don't feel redundant. Nowadays, this one's a little less easy to find than the studio albums or the B-sides compilation, but it's definitely worth tracking down.

The first single of the batch was "Gigantic," and while two of the B-sides are just variations on existing tracks from Surfer Rosa (an extended version of "River Euphrates" and a live version of "Vamos," both of which sounds nice but neither of which is essential), the third is another version of "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)," mentioned in the BBC album and which is every bit as quirky here as there. The second single was "Monkey Gone to Heaven," and the B-sides here are highlighted by "Manta Ray," a catchy-as-hell noisy guitar rocker about who-the-hell-knows-what that could have fit in perfectly with the rest of Doolittle (its companion, "Dancing the Manta Ray," is kinda stupid but endearing, and "Weird at My School" is a little Pixies-by-numbers even if it's ok). The Doolittle singles are rounded out by "Here Comes Your Man," and while the two new tracks ("Into the White," "Bailey's Walk") don't do much for me, the alternate version of "Wave of Mutilation" (subtitled "UK Surf version") is a revelation, a totally different reading of an already great song that manages to match the original.

In the Bossanova era, the first single was "Velouria," and while "Make Believe" probably didn't need to see the light of day, the band's cover of Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You" (sung by Kim Deal) is just terrific (and feels perfectly suited to the band), and "The Thing" is an absolutely lovely chord sequence underpinned by piano and with very subtle bits of guitar draped on top. The second B-side from Bossanova was "Dig for Fire," and while I'm a little underwhelmed by this batch (odd given how much I like the A-side), I do really appreciate the presence of another high-quality Neil Young cover, this time "Winterlong" (originally found on the Decade compilation). Moving into the Trompe Le Monde era, the highlight of the "Planet of Sound" single is undoubtedly the band's cover of the theme music for the video game "Narc," a game I played hundreds of times as a kid and enjoyed the hell out of even though it probably wasn't actually a good game (the band's cover is really solid even without my positive external association). And finally, the "Alec Eiffel" single has an interesting Yardbirds cover ("Evil Hearted You," with Francis making the odd decision to sing the lyrics in Spanish) and the instrumental version of "Letter to Memphis," and together they make for a strong conclusion to the set.

This is by no means an impeccable collection, and in many cases it's clear why the band chose to relegate a given track to a B-side rather than considering it for a proper album, but this collection nonetheless shows that the band had a respectable amount of surplus quality material beyond what made it onto their albums. There's no good reason for a fan of the band's proper albums not to enjoy this, and I'd definitely rather listen to this in full than Bossanova in full.

It's hard for me to see much of a justification for this material to bear the name of "Pixies" rather than that of a Black Francis solo project. I mean, I can see how Black Francis would justify it: he was always the center of Pixies in the first place, and he did get Santiago and Lovering back into the fold, so most of the band was in place. And yet, Deal was never just an irrelevant side figure, her limited songwriting credits notwithstanding, and resurrecting the Pixies name without her, more than 20 years after the release of Trompe Le Monde, can't help but feel like a grotesque cash-grab. For the most part, critical response to this album ranged from tepid to moderately positive, but a major exception came from Pitchfork, and while I don't typically give their perspectives a ton of weight, I actually feel they have a strong point here (they gave it a 2.5/10, whereas the original run of albums had been rated very high across the board). All that Pixies could do at this point was tarnish their reputation, especially if the best they could do with a reunion is become a follower in a movement where they had once been leaders, and judged from the angle of "should this album have been allowed to happen," I'd have to rate it very low.

And yet, almost because I still feel some distance to the kind of music Pixies did when at their best, it's hard for me to have strong passionate feelings regarding what Pixies did at their worst (and as of this writing, I do think this was Pixies at their worst). In a way, this one kind of reminds me of the ill-conceived 2005 Big Star reunion album In Space, which was a pointless album to its core with some terrible material, but also with enough in the way of material that I kinda sorta like that I just can't quite get to the level of hating it. The title track (originally found on EP1), for instance, is a fascinating blend of pleasant and moderately moving power pop interspersed with noisier sections of Francis saying surreal gibberish, and I quite enjoy it. "Ring the Bell" (from EP3) has some awfully lovely ringing guitar parts that makes a gentle and pleasant melody pop in ways that it might not otherwise, and while it might have gotten lost among the band's better albums, it's a genuine standout here. The closing "Jaime Bravo" has an appropriately anthemic feel to it, with fun "woooo woooo" vocals popping up over the rousing guitar interplay that hearkens back to the band's best days in a way that I appreciate.

Of course, the rest of the album makes little impression on me, but that also means that it makes little negative impression on me. There are some general aspects that I think hurt the album, of course, like how Francis has aged into a voice that frequently sounds like the title character from the "Captain Underpants" cartoon my children incessantly watch on Netflix, or how, if somebody asked me to explain how these songs distinguish themselves from other example of indie rock circa 2014, I simply could not do that, but these are points that keep me from liking the album more than they are points that make me hate it. I suppose some of the songs sound particularly ridiculous (the aforementioned "Bagboy" single is a major offender here, and I suspect that it helped put a major bad taste in the mouth of Pitchfork that they couldn't quite get beyond), and yet, with each successive listen, my feelings for the album on a whole solidified on an impression of "it could definitely be better, but it could definitely be a lot worse." I wouldn't recommend any of these albums for somebody with strong emotional ties to the original Pixies run but without a feel for what Black Francis had done in the interim, but I could definitely see a situation where somebody who really liked Black Francis overall could have a fondness for this.

Of course, that's not really much of a compliment. There's one track where the band gets a little sappily indulgent, the Lenchantin-sung "All I Think About Now" (in which Francis uses Lenchantin as his muse to try and make things right with Deal, with limited results, not least because of how much it borrows from "Where is My Mind?"), while the rest is the band trying its very best to keep one foot in the sound that made people like Pixies in the first place while letting the other foot explore new types of indie-rock expression. Some tracks are definitely successful and interesting, such as in the three song stretch of the eerie "Might As Well Be Gone," the grumbly "Oona," and the propulsive "Talent," and there are some nice tracks scattered here and there besides those (like "Bel Esprit," with its back-and-forth vocals between Francis and Lenchantin, or the colorful "All the Saints" that closes the album). The rest of the album, alas, is unremarkably pleasant at best, even if, like its predecessor, it doesn't actively do much to sabotage itself. It's an album that's worth listening to three or four times, inevitably provoking a reaction of "hey that's not bad," and never worth thinking about again. If that sounds good to you, then by all means proceed.

Most importantly, the best songs on here are just really good. The opening "In the Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain" is flat-out menacing in spots in a way that this incarnation hadn't even remotely approached to this point, and the slow guitar interplay mixed with the fast percussion rhythm mixed with the keyboards (there's a Mellotron in there!) makes for a very rousing start to the album. The following "On Graveyard Hill" has a really punchy bass part, and the part near the end when the thick satisfying guitars of the bulk of the song give way to a synth is a total delight. Later on, "This is My Fate" answers the question I had never thought to ask of what Pixies crossed with Tom Waits would sound like, and it turns out that it's a lot of fun, with Francis morphing his voice into Tom's in a surprisingly convincing way, with the other instruments morphing into their own equivalents from a Waits album while still maintaining their own distinct personalities. "Silver Bullet" marks a return to the type of dark melancholy that made "Silver" so enticing on Doolittle, but with the kinds of drastic shifts into more aggressive rocking passages that "Silver" avoided, and it's probably both the best song on the album and the best song this era of the band had produced yet. And near the end of the album, "Daniel Boone" starts off as a memorable ballad with gorgeous thick guitar ambience, shifts into sparser arrangements briefly, and then around the 3:00 mark a guitar passage emerges that ranks among the most inspiring moments on a Pixies album to guide the song into its final stretch.