Pitchfork

A wiser man than myself once sang, "You can't be told it/ You must behold it." That lyric makes sage advice, and has helped me bite my tongue on many occasions when the impulse to wax nostalgic has arisen. I'm not going to tell you how great the Pixies were in the late 1980s; I don't need to. Their music still speaks for itself.

Weathered late-twenties/early-thirties Pixies fans might view Wave of Mutilation with knee-jerk scorn, because they already own everything the Pixies released and "there's so much it leaves off," but best-of compilations aren't for fans. Set aside your memories of turning Doolittle's waxy vinyl sleeve over and over to bring out the spot-gloss coating, of blaring "Bone Machine" the summer you inherited your sister's car. Give the uninitiated a break.

Most of the Pixies' strongest songs are included on Wave of Mutilation, reminding us that they wrote the templates for Nirvana ("Gouge Away") and Weezer ("Velouria"), but the heavily chronological tracklist is a major turn-off for anyone learning these songs for the first time. I'm not going to savage the band over the semantics of sequencing, but nobody buys a greatest hits record to hear how you evolved as an artist: Best-of records are the eight-ball of any group's discography, the quickest fix. The mostly linear presentation also reinforces the economic constraints independent bands shouldered in the 80s: the awkward sonic transitions from "Vamos" to "Hey", from the boxy "Into the White" into the tar-thick "Velouria", and especially from "Planet of Sound" to "Winterlong", make for a stilted, academic listen.

Ignoring the missed opportunity to reposition these cuts in new contexts, if we open up this survey to second-guessing, the only egregious exclusions I can come up with are "Levitate Me", "Cactus" and "No. 13 Baby" (which would be effusive given "Gouge Away"). These omissions are offset by a few daring choices: the anything-but "Tame", whose finale I still consider the most terrifying vocal performance on record, the summery underdog "Hey", and flipside collectables "Into the White" and "Winterlong" (a cover of an unreleased Neil Young outtake, appearing officially on Decade). "Into the White" is one of the Pixies' most immediately catchy tunes, and a major fan favorite, but as someone who wore out a copy of the "Here Comes Your Man" cassingle in three months of playing-and-rewinding, I can tell you it doesn't age well. Playing DJ, I'd switch that out for "Motorway to Roswell", and their venomous cover of The Jesus & Mary Chain's "Head On" over the asinine "U-Mass", since it was the last time, until this year, that I felt like the Pixies enjoyed themselves.

But overall, I'm hard-pressed to find an ignored moment in the Pixies' catalog that out and out invalidates Wave of Mutilation's lengthy tracklist. Re-evaluating the band's saintly status in light of this distillation, it's a mildly depressing realization, because until now, I didn't think the Pixies could be reduced to a tidy best-of. 1997's slight Death to the Pixies reinforced the impossibility of such a task, but by adding just six tracks, Wave of Mutilation manages to live up to its subtitled intent. I don't think I'm alone in having thought of the Pixies as an albums band, yet save a few savory cuts, this is the best of the Pixies, its case made on the lack of credible leftovers.

Interestingly, the compilation seems to acknowledge the widely held contention that the Pixies' last two albums weren't up to the band's standards: Bossanova and Trompe le Monde disappointed anyone expecting more of Doolittle's punchy psychosis. Hindsight has backdated the band's fracture from their public announcement in January 1993, and we now point to The Breeders' Pod and Black Francis' reactionary solo sets in early 1990 as the group's irreparable breaking points. As much as the band enjoyed their success, opening for the Cure and U2, the mounting tension drove Kim Deal further into her sultry Joplin coo with The Breeders, a band initially designed as a side project with Throwing Muses' Tanya Donnelly during the post-Doolittle rift.

Once Kim had checked out, Black Francis' personality dominated the tail-end of the Pixies' career, as he obsessed over post-war UFO paranoia in the desert west. Wave of Mutilation completely excises this very obvious fetish from the Pixies story, short-changing the collection for the sake of purifying the band's memory. Just six of this retrospective's tracks stand in for Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, consigning moodier fan-favorites "Motorway to Roswell", "The Happening" and one of the best album-closers on record, the soaring near-instrumental "Havalina", to infinity.

But the classic songs every skate rat, drama club kid, lacrosse player and their parents should know by heart are here: the Hispanic hip-shaking smash "Here Comes Your Man", the blushing sex ode "Gigantic", and the ballad that became an unspoken anthem for so many, "Where Is My Mind?" Of course, owing to Wave of Mutilation's stiff sequencing, they're all buried halfway through the disc, so if this is your first time with the Pixies, setting your player to random will likely make for the best presentation.

Wave of Mutilation is being released simultaneously with a self-titled, catch-all DVD retrospective, containing the Pixies' seven utterly forgettable no-budget videos, and a pair of documentaries. The first is a 30-minute compilation of fly-on-the-wall video footage from the Pixies' 1989 tours of Europe and America, of no lasting value beyond whatever transferred energy you take away from watching a band on the run. The only interesting moment I can recall is the band's first listen to the Doolittle CD in a London hotel room, Kim folding out the then-shockingly highbrow artwork.

The hour-long history segment Gouge, meanwhile, is hugely educational for anyone who doesn't realize how important the Pixies really were-- David Bowie, Bono, Thom Yorke and Graham Coxon all weigh in with high praise for the first three records-- but the interspersed sepiatone live footage that stretches the piece from 40 to 60 minutes is taken from the same (albeit outstanding) London concert included elsewhere on the disc, in its entirety. All in all, the DVD is worth sale price for any fan, but a sticker anywhere near $20 is asking a lot; the content is strictly bargain bin.