Pixies: Trompe Le Monde [4AD]

Why you'll love it

This 180g 4AD pressing was made in England and keeps the original 15-song running order. Gil Norton produced the band's heaviest, fastest record, and their cover of "Head On" reached No. 6 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Pressed in England

About the album

The title is French for "fool the world," a play on trompe-l'oeil, the painter's trick of making a flat surface look real. It suits a record that sounds like a band driving flat out toward the horizon. Pixies cut it in Burbank, Paris and London with Gil Norton, who had produced Doolittle and Bossanova, and mixed it at Master Rock in London.

Black Francis wrote nearly everything, and he leans into science fiction and surf-metal crunch. "Planet of Sound" is a drop-D blast, "Alec Eiffel" salutes the engineer behind the tower, and "Space (I Believe In)" and "Subbacultcha" bring the heavy guitars. "U-Mass" goes back to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Black Francis met Joey Santiago; Santiago says that riff dates from their student days. Eric Drew Feldman adds keyboards, and "The Navajo Know" closes things out under a desert sky.

Lime Lizard's Michael Bonner called it "a strong contender for best album of the 20th century," and Freaky Trigger's Tom Ewing ranked it ninth among his favourite records of the 1990s. On some early CDs the disc itself was printed "Tromp le Monde," so even the album fooled the world a little; the vinyl spells it properly.

Also at Kops: more Pixies on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# CAD 1014), a reissue of the 1991 album.