There’s a new Pixies album, but first – the past…
It’s 25 years since the release of the Pixies’ Doolittle. Doolittle is a slightly disputable masterpiece, but a masterpiece all the same – it’s the Pixies album which will always be on Classic Album lists, that’s for sure.
I’ve always thought Surfer Rosa was their best album but
maybe that’s because it’s how I got into the Pixies. I’d tried listening to them before because of
their indie reputation (massively influential on Nirvana and Radiohead and loads
of other people I liked), but never really got them, apart from ‘Where Is My
Mind?’ which I only really knew from Fight Club. But once when I was ill and found a tape of
Surfer Rosa in my sister’s cupboard I put it on on a whim. The tape was on repeat and some time on the
fourth go round it clicked and I understood it.
(Digression: I’ve noticed a lot of the music and books I cherish the
most I hated at first. Is this just
me? Is the lazy part of my brain
attempting to stunt the culturally aware part or something?)
Doolittle sounds less unique than Surfer Rosa to me, and
therefore less of an achievement; but perhaps that’s because it was one of
those albums that was so influential it became the indie norm. It has a first half with skittish pop-rock
songs with bizzaro lyrics and a darker, atmospheric second half bridged
together by the a anthemic ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’. Frank Black was obsessively listening to ‘The
White Album’ during the making of Doolittle and in terms of making an album
greater than the sum of its parts, it shows.
‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey…’ and ‘Wave Of Mutilation’ don’t lose anything
outside of the context of the album, but most of the other songs work better as
slow-burning mood-builders, culminating in ‘Gouge Away’, possibly my favourite
ending to an album (possibly not – it all depends on when you ask me, really).
Anyway, the big Pixies news this month is a new album, their
first for 23 years. After they split in
the early 90s they started touring in the 00s, but these were purely ‘Greatest
Hits’ shows – as a creative entity they seemed to have ended for good. And then quite unannounced they started
releasing new music last year.
The Pixies’ reunion has a lot in common with The Beatles’mid-90s reunion we mentioned a few weeks ago in two major ways. One is that both bands had been dormant for
so long and had an influential legacy that new material would always be
compared unfavourably to. The other
similarity is that the reunion in both cases was missing a member. The Beatles at least had two unheard John
Lennon vocal tracks to base new songs around; the new Pixies songs have had no
input from Kim Deal, their charismatic ex-bassist who quit two weeks before the
new material started coming out.
When ‘Bagboy’, the first new Pixies music in ages was
surprise-released last year I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well
as it did. Faint praise there, I know,
but the song had and still has for me an aggressive strangeness and didn’t seem
embarrassing. It didn’t feel out of date,
either – where it failed, it failed on its own terms and not for being a museum
piece (like The Beatles’ ‘Free As A Bird’).
And, in fact, a lot of the new material is just as good as some
of the songs on Trompe le Monde and Bossanova.
The truth is that the memory cheats and the last two Pixies albums have
songs as forgettable as some of the worst on Indie Cindy. Indie Cindy has some great moments, just not
as many as there would have been in their peak.
Playing it alongside Trompe le Monde I don’t see a massive gulf in
quality – both albums have a similar killer/filler ratio (though Indie Cindy
doesn’t have anything nearly as good as ‘Planet Of Sound’…) It’s arguable that, for better or worse,
Indie Cindy just picks up where Trompe le Monde left off.
Pixies songs in the 21st century seem to be
longer than 3 minutes and veer disturbingly into an MOR vibe sometimes, but
they are recognisably Pixies songs. Neither does Indie Cindy sound like the
work of a band who’ve cynically slung any old rubbish together to exploit their
influential reputation. They do sound
like they’re into what they’re doing whether I think it works or not and that’s
the main thing. ‘Bagboy’, ‘Magdalena 318’, ‘What Goes Boom’ and ‘Snakes’ are all
songs where it gels together really well.
‘Magdelena 318’ is especially weird and insidious, Frank Black’s subdued
but still powerful vocals with a mournful surf guitar mixed with a more typical
crunch. On the negative side: ‘Blue Eyed
Hexe’ is a fairly weak re-hash of ‘U-Mass’; ‘Another Toe In The Ocean’ and
‘Ring The Bell’ are bland and forgettable.
The title track has some appallingly bad lyrics (“I’m in love with your
daughter… I’m the one who’s got some trotters/You’ve many mouths to feed” Oh dear).
There’s one thing that nags me. Indie Cindy isn’t really an album so much as
it is a compilation of all the new material that’s been filtering through since
‘Bagboy’ was released for download last year – there is nothing on this album
that hasn’t been released already. This
is a major irritation, and undoes a lot of the general good feeling I have
toward the band when listening to it.
There is a lot more of a sense of artistic viability in some of these
tracks than there was in The Beatles reunion tracks, one-woman-down or no; but
releasing an album out of 3 EPs (the last of which was only out a month ago)
seems like a casually cynical piece of marketing, and makes it feel like the whole thing was
done for the money after all.
Anyway, I’ve deliberately not read reviews of the new Pixies
songs to try and make for a non-biased blog, so I’m going to go and read what
savagings they’ve no doubt been getting in the press…
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