Bossanova

Pixies | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 20, 2003)
• Original Release Date: 1990
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: 4ad / Ada
• ASIN: B00008YJHC
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (89 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,748 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #17 in Music > Jazz > Brazilian Jazz

Editorial Reviews

This classic album is available on vinyl for the first time in years. Pressed on audiophile quality 180-gram vinyl. "Bossanova" has scanned over 253K RTD. --This text refers to the Vinyl edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the pixies' greatest album (and that's saying something), December 15, 1999

By 

Grock (the red river valley) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bossanova (Audio CD)

I, like many other young'uns, was introduced to the Pixies by the name-dropping habits of bands like Nirvana. After buying Doolittle, and scarfing up the rest of their releases, the rest of my CD collection has basically been rendered average. At first listen, Bossanova sounded rather dull compared to "Debaser," "Here Comes Your Man," and other perfect pop tunes off of Doolittle. But like any great album, it slowly but surely grows on you. Every listen will reveal a new quirk. "Cecilia Ann" gets things rocking majestically but of course with a surfer's touch. "Rock Music" has become my favorite song with indecipherable lyrics. Black Francis' scream is truly an instrument as much as the guitar or bass. "Velouria" has a guitar riff and melody that seem odd at first listen but totally make sense and seem like perfection later. This entire album is chock full of great melodies and harmonies. The fastest song on the album, "Allison," also seems to be a love song of sorts, or at least infatuation, featuring the simple yet effective lyric, "and when the planet hit the sun, I saw the face of Allison." "Ana" is a great acoustic song with an overall eerie vibe. Same for "Havalina," which closes out the album with a bit of calm after the chaotically fun "Stormy Weather," which I like to think of as a sing-a-long for the end of the world. Then there are the epic tracks "All Over The World" and "The Happening," which are great examples of lengthy songs that can keep a listener riveted through their entire playlength. The latter of the songs also features Black Francis' trademark lyrics dealing with outer space and its inhabitants. The album as a whole features wonderfully obscure lyrics that will leave you scratching your head, smiling, thinking, or possibly all of the above if you're moderately demented. I cannot stress how great this album is!

46 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the weirdest thing the pixies ever did., April 20, 2004

By 

Campbell Roark "tri-zeta" (from under the floorboards and through the woods...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bossanova (Audio CD)

My favorite band throughout all of high school broke up when i was in 9th grade. It's ok though, cuz I dropped out before completing 10th. This is they: The Pixies.

Ecce Pixies. The first time I heard this (I had bought it earlier that day, in the cheap bin at the Aiken mall on cassette) I listened to it the whole thing, over and over, on the long greyhound ride from SC to WV, going home for Thanksgiving break, 1992... I was one week shy of 14.

It's odd- Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa are both visceral angry, snarling little albums- you can hear the progression, but they both sound similar. Same for Doolittle and Trompe le Monde- both are poppy, punky, surrealistic little goldmines with songs about topics as diverse as Roswell, Samson being blind and pulling down the temple pillars (Gouge Away), how we bringing the apocalypse down on or heads, love and gun-running on a panamanian schooner...

BUT. Bossanove sounds like nothing else The Pixies ever did. And that's why it's my fave (She's my fave, undressing in the sun...). It's an ethereal, black-as-night, grim but gorgeous album full of reckless punk screaming and the rambling lyrics of Black Francis, Ms. Deal's badass bassery, Dave's fine drumming and the ever-inimitable Mr. santiago's piercing guitar lines. This is the album that made me want to learn surf guitar (before all you cheap copsters with your pulp fiction soundtracks crashed the gates, he he).

Velouria, The Happening, Ana (my favorite song by them- a gentle and soft spanish masterpiece that stands out utterly in their corpus, sounds like waves breaking on blue sand at sunset), Cecilia Anne, Allison... This is an album that you can put on and enjoy. Oh, and it works really well if you put it on while waatching Disney's 'Alice in Wonderland,' indulge in some minor league organic substance abuse, turn the tv volume down and- ENJOY.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My personal favorite Pixies release, June 25, 2006

By 

Wheelchair Assassin (The Great Concavity) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bossanova (Audio CD)

It seems like when it comes to the Pixies, the talk is generally "Surfer Rosa this" and "Doolittle that," and while those are certainly good albums I've never figured out why Bossanova got so much less attention than its two predecessors. With the exception of Trompe Le Monde (which I plan on getting around to eventually, I swear) I've heard pretty much the Pixies' whole output, and out of of everything this album keeps me coming back the most often. Bossanova turns down the noise assaults from the Pixies' earlier career down just a bit, but in their place is a more arty, spacey effort that throws some heavy surf-rock influence into the band's already wide-ranging sound. Sure, there may not be anything that completely matches the sheer visceral immediacy of Broken Face or Tame, but for track-by-track excellence and diversity Bossanova is difficult if not impossible to top.

After the blistering, hard-rocking instrumental opener Cecilia Ann sets the tone, Bossanova immediately commences careening all over the musical map in a way the legions of alternative imitators that emerged in the 90's wouldn't even dream of. With Black Francis screaming his head off at full volume, the angry, assaultive Rock Music sounds like Debaser on steroids, but from there the album takes a turn into more diverse and overall compelling territory that sounds little like previous albums. Songs constantly veer off in unpredictable directions, making Bossanova more of an acquired taste than its predecessors, but it's one more than worth acquiring. This album represents the Pixies' peak as musicians (at least to that point); the rawer edges from Surfer Rosa and Doolittle had definitely been toned down, but those albums didn't contain anything quite like the complex, Talking Heads-like rhythms of Dig For Fire or the dense, proto-grunge sheets of guitar noise of Down to the Well. The Pixies' legendary use of dynamics was also honed to perfection here: just check out the way the whiplash guitars kick in at the perfect time in the soaring, etheral Velouria, or the way Black Francis's eery vocals and Kim Deal's crawling bassline give way to the headbanging chorus of Is She Weird.

All Over the World is one of the strangest things the Pixies ever did, a sprawling epic (by Pixies standards, anyway) filled with spacey lyrics and searing lead guitar lines from Joey Santiago that seem to come out of nowhere. And is that a falsetto Black Francis is doing with his voice? Well, yeah, most of the time, but it works perfectly for the song's trippy, drug-like feel. Even when they're plowing ahead at full speed, as on Allison and Hang Wire, the band's more tuneful, surf-rock direction is apparent, but it's even more evident on pleasant, literally pacific tracks like Ana and the closing Havalina.

My enduring favorite from this album, though, would have to be Happening. It doesn't start off all that unusually for a Pixies song, with Black Francis screaming his bizarrely imagistic lyrics on top of some slashing guitars and atomic bass riffs, but over its running time it just gets progressively eerier and more demented, with lots of surfy breaks popping up in the mix, culminating in Black Francis's stream-of-consciousness, half-spoken-half-sung mantra as the song fades out. It's a total classic, just like this album, and essential listening for those who want to hear alternative rock from back when the label meant something.