From The Vaults

Pixies
Doolittle
4AD/Elektra, 1989

When did indie rock start? Conventional wisdom pins The Velvet Underground as the band that got the ball rolling, and that makes a lot of sense considering that they were the first significant cult band. But they can't be really be labeled "indie" or "punk" without the prefix "proto" out front, since they recorded decades before those terms were even coined.
So for the title of First-Actual-Indie-Rock-Band, I think the Pixies are as good a choice as any. They were perhaps the first band to successfully blend punk's aggressiveness, new wave's arty strangeness, and big pop hooks into a unified, inextricable mess. Their first album Surfer Rosa was downright brilliant, but that didn't stop them from one-upping themselves with their sophomore release Doolittle. Frontman Black Francis turns out a handful of absolute classics, and bassist/vocalist Kim Deal proves to be the secret weapon to end all secret weapons with her plodding bass-lines and melodic background vocals.
Doolittle is an extremely referential record that still sounds utterly unique - perhaps serving as the mission statement for the indie rock ethos of grinding up recognizable elements of popular culture into something new. In this sense, everyone from Beck and Pavement to Danger Mouse and Girl Talk are indebted to the album. But Doolittle's influence on indie music is also discernible in a much more direct way. Weezer directly quotes the melody from "I Bleed" at the end of their "Sweater Song," and "Dead" sounds like a near-blueprint for the upbeat freak-out numbers from The Dismemberment Plan's excellent 1999 album Emergency and I. And those are two of the most obscure tracks on Doolittle. The influence of classics like "Debaser," "Here Comes Your Man," "Wave of Mutilation," and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is incalculable - these are the kind of songs that modern indie rockers trade right arms for in hypothetical scenarios.
But most importantly, none of this historical "significance" stuff get in the way of the fact that this is quite simply one of the most fun records to listen to ever. With the hooks and brevity of a pop album, the aggressive energy of a punk album, and the disturbing weirdness of an art rock album, this is a one-stop shop when you can't decide what kind of mood your in. Gouge away.

MP3: Debaser

Buy Doolittle