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."
