Transatlantic

A specific accent of the English language not native to any place.

It is about halfway between British and American. It is considered an advantage for an actor to be able to speak transatlantic properly (it is not just a random mix of British and American but a very specific accent having its own exact rules).

It is often considered hard to master because if not done absolutely right it sounds completely fake and ridiculous. When done right, it sounds very sophisticated.

The transatlantic accent is generally used for characters that cannot speak with any real English accent, for example aliens in science fiction, or non-English characters in historical fiction. Also used by God to express the idea that God does not belong to any particular place or culture but transcends them all.

The transatlantic accent is often recommended to immigrants from non-English speaking countries. This is because people are used to this accent from movies, so, ironically, it does not sound foreign when spoken by immigrants.

A Pixies bootleg album.

"Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but it seems that all the stupid pop songs from yesterday are better than the stupid pop songs of today."

-- Black Francis

Late February, a rainy Sunday afternoon in Camden Town. Milling round the market stalls, trying to fulfill the seemingly opposing objectives of: 1) sheltering from the rain and 2) finding open space away from the crowds. My mind none too sharp, the previous days' experimentation with sleep deprivation having left me almost unable to cope with the massive sleep deficit accumulated over the past two weeks. Trying to keep our snide comments about all the clean-cut nu-metal kiddies at a volume level audible only to us. A phone call from a loved one; an apparently half-missing /msg from the morning. A record stall.

Amongst the random treasures, such as a reading of a treatise on the benefits of LSD by Dr. Timothy Leary, I found this one.

Recorded at two different performances from the band's Doolittle tour, the album's mostly made up of songs from Doolittle, though there's a few from Surfer Rosa and Come on Pilgrim: mostly from a performance at the Cabaret Metro, Chicago IL on 10/08/1989 (this could be a European or American date format though...); the remainder from the European leg of the tour, specifically the Koncerthall in Vienna (Austria) on 11/06/1989. The sound quality is about what you'd expect from a good quality live bootleg, and the performances themselves are classic Pixies, capturing the real live concert atmosphere that's been so lacking in the available recorded Pixies material.

The CD and inlay are cleanly done and pretty: high quality print and pressed CD. The illustrations seem professionally done, culled from details from the original Doolittle illustrations: the front cover a composition of a random rock shot and 'Pixies' and 'Transatlantic' text in white. Inside covers are sections from the illustration to Wave of Mutilation, the rear cover from the illutration to Hey.

The 'sleeve notes' are of course entirely devoid of traceable elements: no recording credits, etc. other than the band, and a rather pathetic looking duplication of the standard 'All rights reserved' message. Included, however, are a band photo and a couple of nifty Black Francis quotes; that at the beginning of this writeup, and also:

"You get these bands claiming that if they hadn't found rock 'n roll they'd have turned into mass murderers. I'm not so sure about this theory. People who manage to organize themselves to get a band together, hire a studio, pay their studio bill, they've got their shit together. They don't strike me as the kind of people who would otherwise be chopping up bodies and burying them in the Utah desert."

-- Black Francis

Track Listing

1. Bone Machine
2. Cactus
3. Caribou
4. Crackity Jones
5. Dead
6. Debaser
7. Gigantic
8. Gouge away
9. Hey
10. Holiday Song
11. I Bleed
12. Isla de Encanta
13. Levitate Me
14. Mr. Grieves
15. Monkey Gone to Heaven
16. Tame
17. There Goes My Gun
18. Wave of Mutilation (slow, Uk-Surf style version)
19. Where is My Mind?
20. Into the White
21. Nimrod's Son
22. No. 13 Baby
23. River Euphrates
24. Vamos
25. Wave of Mutilation

Tracks 1-21 are from the Chicago gig, tracks 22-25 from Vienna.

Trans`at*lan"tic (?), a. [Pref. trans- + Atlantic: cf. F. transatlantique.]

1.

Lying or being beyond the Atlantic Ocean.

⇒ When used by a person in Europe or Africa, transatlantic signifies being in America; when by a person in America, it denotes being or lying in Europe or Africa, especially the former.

2.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

© Webster 1913.