Music
Like Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa displays a mix of musical styles; pop guitar songs such as "Broken Face", "Break My Body", and "Brick Is Red" are featured alongside slower, more melodic tracks exemplified by "Where Is My Mind?". The album includes heavier material, and prominently features the band's trademark quiet-loud dynamic. Frontman and principal songwriter Black Francis wrote the material, the only exception being "Gigantic," which was co-written with Kim Deal. "Gigantic" is one of only two Pixies album tracks on which Deal sang lead vocals.
Surfer Rosa's lyrical content includes examinations of mutilation and incest in "Break My Body" and "Broken Face", while references to superheroes appear on "Tony's Theme". Voyeurism appears in "Gigantic", and surrealistic lyrics are featured on "Bone Machine" and "Where Is My Mind?". Puerto Rico references and Spanish lyrics are found on the tracks "Oh My Golly!" and "Vamos." The latter track was previously featured on Come On Pilgrim, and appears on Surfer Rosa as a rerecorded version of the original song. Many of the themes explored on previous recordings are revisited on Surfer Rosa; however, unlike on the band's later albums, the songs in Surfer Rosa are not preoccupied with one overarching topic.
Other unusual and offbeat subject matter is raised on the album. "Cactus" is narrated by a prison inmate who requests his girlfriend smear her dress with blood and mail it to him. "Gigantic" is an "unabashed praisesong to a well-endowed black man," and borrows from the 1986 film Crimes of the Heart, in which a married woman falls in love with a teenager. Francis was inspired to write "Where Is My Mind?" after scuba diving in the Caribbean. He later said he had "this very small fish trying to chase me. I don't know why—I don't know too much about fish behavior."
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