15 is a pretty pivotal age, is it not? I was sort of typical as traumatized, transsexual punk rock superfans of jangle pop tend to go. At the time, Vaughn Oliver’s artwork on the cover was a stamp of approval. When The Pixies’ “Doolittle” came out, the guy at the record store inside the Montgomery Ward in Crossroads Mall (the store that sold hardcore and indie rock tapes for some inexplicable reason) said that the promo came with actual Pixie Stix, and I found that cute. I suppose this said a lot about The Pixies and how I felt about them. I fell in love with their EPs earlier that year, and was very excited about this album when it came out. First impression was that it wasn’t as fun, it ran a little long, but ended very solidly. I was prepared to listen as many times as it took for it all to sink in though, and luckily at the time, I wasn’t so aware of Francis’s bullying style. The album grew around me, as the cassette was flipped a thousand times. There was fun about it that ran against the label they were on. There was enough noise on the guitar tone to scare off the normies, and it hit like a Jesus and Mary Chain song when they really stepped off the brakes, chugging along like the best fuzzed out college rock should. The songs represented feeling angsty and depressed but at the same time: doing what you could to fight against that feeling.
FFO That Petrol Emotion, The Breeders, Nirvana
Mystery Doll 