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Long before he made his name as one of the world's foremost recording engineers, former Big Black and Shellac frontman Steve Albini made no shortage of enemies with his acerbic writing for various punk rock fanzines. But it still came as something of a surprise when, writing in Forced Exposure in 1991, Albini described Pixies as a band "who at their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock."
“Their willingness to be ‘guided’ by their manager, their record company and their producers is unparalleled," Albini wrote. "Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings."
The critique seemed especially harsh because Albini's work with Pixies on 1988's Surfer Rosa (and later with bassist Kim Deal on Breeders' Last Splash) became a touchstone for a generation of alternative rock bands, Nirvana among them.
At the time, Albini subsequently admitted, he was both "nervous and cocky" about working with Pixies, and "pretty much still learning on the job".
“It was early in my tenure as an engineer and I wanted to validate myself and have an impact,” he told The Guardian in 2020.
"I hadn't done many records for anybody at that point," Albini told the Life On The Record podcast. "And the Pixies were unusual in that they were a band that I had no prior relationship with... They didn't seem to be even the slightest bit familiar with other records I had done, or my bands' music, that didn't seem like it had penetrated into the world at all."
In regards the comment "Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings", Albini said. "I would suggest something and they would say yes. That made me feel like I was having too big of an influence on the record, and that made me uncomfortable."
Given the benefit of hindsight, Albini admitted that his critique of the band in 1991 was harsh.
"When they first started to become more well known in the US. a lot of people in underground circles were suspicious of them," he reflected. "They were a bit naive about the workings of the music industry, I guess is the way you'd put it. And they seemed very credulous and I talked about that a little bit with respect to me influencing the album by making suggestions and them acceding to all of my suggestions. I wrote some rather glib and unflattering things about that in a fanzine in the immediate aftermath of that record, and I'm ashamed of the way I treated them. They didn't deserve that.
"Every now and again, I have cause to hear the Pixies album that I worked on in context somewhere, like I'm in a bar and a song will come on, or I'm watching a movie and a song will come on, and I think it's a better record than I thought it was at the time. At the time, I had all of these like conflicting intellectual perspectives on it, and I couldn't just listen to it for its effect. And now when I hear it as a finished record, I think it sounds very good and I think the band sounds very good and I don't find a lot to criticize."
Listen to the full Life Of The Record podcast, with input from Pixies duo Joey Santiago and David Lovering, below.
