I am a Complete Twat

Pixies and Violent Femmes often sound extraordinarily similar

This is something that really struck me from the first time I heard the Violent Femmes, and since then I've searched the internetz, head to toe, in an attempt to find out if anybody else has noticed this, or if I'm just plain crazy (admittedly, the fact I care so much doesn't show my mental health to be top notch).

Anyway, the only thing I managed to find on the subject was this, which just straight up says ""Nimrod’s Son” is a theatrical update of the Violent Femmes’ early acoustic punk". While this told me that someone else agrees that they sound familiar, it seems to assume that the Pixies' style of music was a conscious development on the Violent  Femmes' particular brand of rock'n'fackin'roll.

I'm forced to conclude that there is little possibility that Violent Femmes influenced Pixies, mainly due to the complete fruitlessness of internet searches regarding this. The only way that I can explain the similarity in their sound is that they both:

A) were American and got together in the '80s.
B) were influenced by a variety of genres, most notably folk, surf and punk.
C) had most of their songs written by, at the time, teenage lunatics (read: geniuses).

Anyway, here's a couple of videos to show what I'm on about:

Violent Femmes



Pixies



This was a pretty pointlessly long winded way of saying two awesome bands are similar.