Pixies - Surfer Rosa

The Plymouth Rock on which alternative rock was founded, the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa forever altered the music environment—even if it did take most of the world a few years to catch up with its brilliance. Internationally acknowledged as a pioneering record, its rollercoaster blend of harsh and soft tempos, male and female singing, intense punk and bubblegum pop tones, dark and light quips, and off-kilter sensibilities is the influential equivalent of the Velvet Underground’s oft-cited 1967 debut.

The 1987 debut established the Pixies as otherworldly visionaries whose songs such as the insistent “Bone Machine,” badgering “Something Against You,” and sensual “Cactus” remain ahead of the curve. Having analog fanatic and noise aficionado Steve Albini working production ensured that the music would retain a requisite rawness and in-your-face sonic signature that paralleled the fundamentally chaotic, compulsive characteristics of the Pixies’ songs.

And now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of Mobile Fidelity engineers, you will truly hear this groundbreaking record as if you were experiencing it for the first time. Vivid, immediate, massive, and detailed, this is how Surfer Rosa was meant to be heard when Albini completed it and turned it into the label.

Why pay $175 for the Pixies’ Minotaur limited-edition box that features the band’s four original records with dated (read: bland, compressed, and flat) sound when you can spend far less and, in addition to this superior 180-gram LP copy, get hybrid SACDs of Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, and Bossanova that play in all CD players and feature remastered sound sourced from the original master tapes? Jeff Anderson, who oversaw the release of Minotaur, says there is no remastering on the box because he didn’t want to touch the original master tapes. We did, and having finally hunted the true masters down, know you’ll agree with our results.

“The heaviness and hugeness of the room-reverberating drumbeat that begins the album-opening “Bone Machine” epitomizes the record’s forward impact, visceral punch, grinding crunch, and dynamic headroom. Rather than cluttering the mix with an avalanche of effects, Albini left space without sacrificing live detail or volatile oomph, shown to great effect on “Broken Face,” “Gigantic (there’s a piano—who knew?), and haunting “Where Is My Mind?,” which opens unto a sonic canyon that swallows the listener whole.” –Bob Gendron, The Absolute Sound, September 2007

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