Some bands' b-sides are sweepings. The Pixies' b-sides are a shadow discography, nineteen tracks from the 1988 to 1991 run when the band could not miss, taped to the backs of singles because the CD-single era demanded extras and Black Francis wrote faster than albums could hold. Complete B-Sides: 1988-97 were collected on CD in 2001, mid-breakup, and promptly went out of print in the format that mattered. Twenty-five years later, 4AD has remastered the whole thing from the original analog tapes and pressed it to vinyl for the first time, adding a fourth side of live tracks.
The reissue machinery around legacy bands deserves suspicion, and this one earned some: Far Out's review called the campaign a cash-in and argued the comp mostly proves how much the band lost when Kim Deal left. Fair points, wrong conclusion. This is the rare b-sides record that works as an album, and more than that, it's a decoder ring for everything the Pixies were listening to, watching, and joking about at their peak. You just have to know what you're looking at.
Play along; the whole remaster streams on Bandcamp:
"Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)" is the one the world knows without knowing it. The band cut this slowed, submerged rereading of the Doolittle track for the "Here Comes Your Man" single, and it found its second life on the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack in 1990, soundtracking Christian Slater's pirate radio nihilism. A whole generation met the Pixies through the b-side version, and plenty never went back. It remains the strongest argument in the catalog that arrangement is authorship.
"Into the White" is Kim Deal's four-and-a-half minutes of total ownership, a fog bank of a song that closed live sets beneath actual smoke machines. If you want to test Far Out's thesis that Deal was essential, this is Exhibit A, and the band put it on a b-side. That's how deep the bench was.
"In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)" is the Rosetta stone. It's a live cover of the Peter Ivers song from Eraserhead, David Lynch's 1977 debut, the movie Black Francis has pointed to as a formative obsession. The Pixies' whole surrealist-domestic-dread mode has Lynch in its DNA, and here they are saying so out loud, on the back of a single, in 1988.
The Neil Young pair. "Winterlong" and "I've Been Waiting for You" are both Neil Young covers, and they map the band's secret classicist streak. Here's the detail worth the price of the record: David Bowie, the Pixies' loudest famous champion, later recorded both a Pixies cover ("Cactus") and his own version of "I've Been Waiting for You" on 2002's Heathen. The influence ran in a loop: Young to Pixies to Bowie, all through one b-side.
"Theme From NARC" is Joey Santiago's surf-guitar cover of the theme from NARC, the 1988 arcade shooter. A band at their commercial peak spending studio time on a video game theme, decades before that was a respectable thing to do, tells you everything about their relationship to high and low culture, which is that they refused to acknowledge the difference.
"Evil Hearted You" is a Yardbirds cover sung entirely in Spanish, the same border-radio Spanish that runs through "Vamos" and "Isla de Encanta." "Make Believe" is a garage-punk love letter to Debbie Gibson, played completely straight. "Santo" tips its mask to Mexican wrestling pictures. The b-sides are where the band's obsessions went walking without a leash, and the comp reads like the inside of Black Francis's head circa 1990: Lynch, Neil Young, surf records, arcade cabinets, luchadores, teen pop.
The remaster is by Kevin Vanbergen from the original tapes, completing his pass across the entire Pixies catalog, so this finally sits sonically level with the recent album reissues. The original 19 tracks fill three sides of vinyl; side four adds six live cuts pulled from later singles, including the 1997 "Debaser" re-release that gives the title its "-97": "Planet of Sound," "Tame," "Debaser," "Holiday Song," "Cactus," and "Nimrod's Son," all live. Note "Cactus" closing the loop from earlier; the song Bowie chose for Heathen gets its live document on the same record as the band's Neil Young covers. The full 25-track edition streams and sells digitally on Bandcamp.
Then there's the sleeve, which for this label is never an afterthought. 4AD's design identity under the late Vaughan Oliver is one of the great bodies of work in music packaging, and the Pixies covers built with photographer Simon Larbalestier are its most famous wing. For this edition, Oliver's longtime v23 partner Chris Bigg built new artwork from Larbalestier photographs originally shot for the band and then shelved, images that waited three decades for a sleeve, designed in tandem with the Live at the BBC reissue as a tribute to Oliver, who died in 2019. Archival design from the original hands and the original negatives.
Out June 26, and two of three editions are already sold out at 4AD's US store: black vinyl ($33.98) and 2xCD ($21.23) are gone, leaving the crystal clear 2xLP at $36.53 at press time. Rough Trade, the UK/EU store, your local shop, and Bandcamp for digital are the fallbacks.
