Throwing Muses
That first album is the sound of frenzied, sweating, blood-soaked adolescence - colours and sweat and memories and potential - wild and feral and alive.
The Pixies may have wound up with the (posthumous) fame and well-publicised reunion tours, but they never went half as far, never hit half as hard as that original Throwing Muses album. It's obvious even from their earliest releases that at their heart the Pixies were still a conventional rock band. Both Kristin and Tanya may have ended up succumbing to that same conservative impulse, but those early Throwing Muses releases are not remotely conventional. They dart off on tangents, erupting into screaming and spiralling down into edgy calm with equal frequency and suddenness. There's no simple verse-chorus structures here - the songs spin and whirl around themselves, seemingly based on a logic that bears no relation to musical tradition, and yet feels far more natural than the mathematical preciseness of so many artists' musical structures.
This is music alive with stories - a boy was tangled in his bike forever, a girl was missing two fingers - and life and fury and potential. It tangles with stories from your own adolescence (the kid who was murdered and dumped in your neighbour's garden, the couple whose house burnt down while they were building it and spent the rest of their lives living in a tiny shack opposite the ruins because they couldn't afford any insurance...) and dares you to turn them into something as rich, as bright and fierce as it is.
