Pixies: Doggerel — ripping up the country songbook and spitting it out

In Pixies recording lore, lead singer, main songwriter and substantial frontman Black Francis (aka Charles Thompson IV) would arrive at the studio with snippets of lyrics and scraps of tunes, lay them out for the assembled musicians and then proceed to shape them into something that would, over time, approximate a sequence of songs.

For Doggerel — the Boston band’s eighth album, and their fourth since 2013 — there was no such disorganisation, but rather a change of plan. During the pandemic, Francis worked on 1950s-inspired country songs for an Americana solo album, but when recording sessions started for Doggerel 12 months ago, producer Tom Dalgety seized one song (Human Crimes) and turned it inside out. While the track’s desolate love-lost narrative remained, its one-time C&W form was given a distilled punk/post-punk treatment.

The same could be said for the entirety of the album. Dregs of the Wine (the first song by original Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago to find its way on to a band album) is drenched in The Who’s taut pop/rock era, Pagan Man is gothic folk/rock, Nomatterday is rock’n’roll dressed in riot gear, while Who’s More Sorry Now? is a somewhat less musically frantic song (uncharacteristically so for this album) with a more representative storyline that mops up tears with a vinegar-soaked cloth.

The album’s topics might be a tad dystopian, but when the music is this tight and venomous, what’s not to love?