Why does everyone write about the Pixies and "quiet verse, loud chorus"?

xpost

because music writers, like all journos, tend to get lazy and trade in Accepted Narratives(e.g. music history according to VH1).

Like how Nirvana brought punk back the U.S. after the Sex Pistols killed it.

Plenty of bands(Husker Du and others) had this dynamic in the songs; Frank Zappa even extolled its virtues.

Yes, dig that quiet sootheing verse on "Debaser" and "Dead" and the raucous, ball-to-the-wall freneticism of "La La Love You".

husker du had lots of things in their songs, but dynamics was not one of them. 95 percent of their songs went like this: loud verse/loud chorus.

quiet/loud terminology is one of the blights on Pixies criticism...as far as loud verses and quiet choruses for them, look no further than Gouge Away...

Bone Machine is the perfect example...on a cursory listen it seems that it does the quiet verse and loud chorus thing, but then you ask yourself "What is the chorus?" Is it the part that goes "Your Island skin looks Mexican, our love is rice and beans and horses lard"? Because actually that part resembles more of a pre-chorus. Actually, the chorus is "Your bone is a little machine", which is the quietest part of the entire song. Basically, Pixies deconstructed the formula before it even was a formula...

I think better than the quiet/loud contrast is what the big orange book calls it, "a mixture of raw and cooked punk" This is another way of saying build-up/tension/release (see Caribou) and of course Zappa praised it: it's good songwriting. You can also ask Smokey Robinson; "Tracks of My Tears" uses the same technique.

Actually, that was one of the things about the Pixies was how they added (further) sophistication to Huskers-style pop-punk. Nothing really brand-new back then to the technique itself, but these refinements was opposed to the flatness of affect that most hardcore bands had worn like a badge of honor. When critics say that Pixies created "modern rock" (another inappropriate term that plagues them), what they really mean, perhaps without kowing it, is that they added standard pop songwriting techniques to punk, for all intents and purposes pulling it back into "rock" territory.

Loud verse/quiet chorus: The Band - "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)"