Pixies recorded Doolittle at Downtown Recorders in Boston, starting on Halloween 1988, which feels right. The album that emerged, fifteen songs and forty minutes, released on April 17, 1989, opens with a man describing sliced eyeballs and closes with Samson chained to pillars while someone strokes his hair. In between, there is a jangly pop song about hobos, a drummer singing a lounge number, two cellos and two violins swelling over a meditation on ecological collapse, and a guitarist covering his Marshall cabinets with blankets because he thought the producer was adding too much reverb. What's remarkable is that none of this feels random. Doolittle is one of the most coherent records in the college-rock canon, and its coherence is entirely invisible until you stop and look at what's actually holding it together.
The argument for coherence starts with the bookends. "Debaser" opens the album with Black Francis's imaginary soundtrack to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, the one where an eyeball gets sliced in the opening scene. "Gouge Away," the closer, retells the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, and its title does exactly what it says. Eyes being damaged open the record; eyes being gouged close it. That's a frame, and it tells you what kind of logic is operating here. The album lives in the space where the sacred and the grotesque are the same thing, where violence is theological and theology is physical. Francis's fascination with biblical themes went back to his childhood. When he was twelve, he and his parents joined the Pentecostal church. That background doesn't explain the songs so much as it explains why the songs feel like they mean something, even when the words are half-improvised and the imagery is deliberately slippery.
The production was the other structural decision, and it was a contested one. Ivo Watts-Russell, head of 4AD, chose British producer Gil Norton after the band's previous record, Surfer Rosa, had been recorded by Steve Albini in his characteristically raw style. Norton arrived in Boston in mid-October 1988, when he and Francis met to review the demo recordings. They spent two days analyzing the songs' structures and arrangements, then two weeks in pre-production as Norton familiarized himself with the band's sound. The budget was $40,000, four times what Surfer Rosa had cost. Joey Santiago, whose lead guitar on the album moves between surf-inflected melodicism and abrasive noise, was suspicious enough of Norton's approach that he covered his Marshall cabinets with blankets one day to make a point about reverb. The tension was productive. Norton's production gave the quiet parts actual quiet, which meant the loud parts hit harder. The album is praised for its quiet-loud dynamic, achieved through subdued verses built on Kim Deal's bass patterns and David Lovering's drums, with the peaks arriving via distorted guitars from Francis and Santiago. The dynamic had been in rock music for decades, but Norton and the band deployed it with a precision that made it feel like a weapon.
What the dynamic serves, track by track, is a kind of emotional whiplash that the sequencing keeps calibrated. "Here Comes Your Man," a jangly, almost Beatles-bright pop song that Francis said felt like a dark David Lynch movie full of hobos, sits at track five, between "I Bleed" and the Old Testament murder of "Dead." "La La Love You," a track on which drummer David Lovering sings lead vocals while the band plays a deliberately corny love song, arrives at track ten, right after "Crackity Jones" has burned through its eighty-four seconds of manic paranoia. "Monkey Gone to Heaven," the album's lead single, functions as its thematic center, closing out Side One at track seven. It was the first Pixies song to feature guest musicians: cellists Arthur Fiacco and Ann Rorich, and violinists Karen Karlsrud and Corine Metter, adding an orchestral layer to a song about environmental collapse and biblical numerology. The strings are eerie and beautiful, and they make the song feel larger than its two minutes and fifty-six seconds. The contrast between that and the sprint of "Crackity Jones" a few tracks later is not accidental. The album breathes by knowing when to expand and when to compress.
The lyrics operate on a similar principle of controlled disorder. Almost all fifteen tracks were written by Black Francis, with "Silver" co-written with Kim Deal, and the subject matter covers Buñuel and Dalí, Samson, Japanese businessmen driving cars into the ocean, a man who controls the sea, and a love song that is also a joke about baseball. The connecting tissue is attitude: everything on Doolittle is treated with the same flat, almost deadpan intensity, so that the absurd and the apocalyptic land with equal weight. Deal's harmonies are the emotional counterweight throughout, sweet and unflinching in the same breath, the reason the chaos feels human. The album reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart upon release, while charting at number 171 on the US Billboard 200, a gap that says something about where the audience for this kind of music was in April 1989. Melody Maker and Sounds both named it their album of the year.
Thirty-five years later, the record's reputation has only grown in the direction it was always pointing. Kurt Cobain said Doolittle was one of his favorite records and that its songs heavily influenced Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." That lineage is real, but it's also a little beside the point when you're actually listening to the album. The quiet-loud template became so widely borrowed that it's easy to forget how precisely it was deployed here, how much the album's power depends on the specific order of these specific songs, on the decision to let David Lovering whistle and croon through "La La Love You" and then follow it with the dead seriousness of "No. 13 Baby." The album ends on "Gouge Away," which brings back the rough energy of the opening and closes the biblical loop that "Debaser" opened. It's a record that knew where it was going from the first note, even if it never told you.
