Pixies

The Pixies were one of the most important bands of the 1980s, pioneering much of the alternative rock of the following decade.

Formed in Boston in 1986, with Charles "Black Francis” Thompson on vocals, Joey Santiago on guitar, David Lovering on drums and Kim Deal on bass, the Pixies had the great merit of renewing one of the most abused idioms of white popular music: garage-rock. They did so by transmitting to that genre, based on wild energy and catchy melodies, the brain of the average college student, that is, the passion for eccentricity, the sharpness of intellectual art, the post-modern perspective, the humor of the dorms and a hint of alienation; blending effervescent garage-pop with slightly chaotic and dissonant song structures.

The EP Come On Pilgrim (Elektra, 1987) introduced a group capable of deconstructing the novelty (e.g. two zany "Mexican" nursery rhymes such as Vamos, featuring an icy solo by Santiago, and Isla De Incanto, with the frenetic tempo of a quadrille a` la Violent Femmes) and of immersing themselves in Velvet Underground-ian acid raga (Ed Is Dead); a group able to get "high" with Neil Young-ian electrical neuroses (Holiday Song) and to dance at Pere Ubu's grotesque pace (Levitate Me , one of the peaks), to get excited at Gun Club's exhilarating country-blues (Nimrod's Son) while getting lost in the delicate balance of "acid" distortions, blues and ska tempos of I've Been Tired. Deal opens the EP in a solemn way, with the waltzing Caribou, which combines the most epic elements of psychedelia, the nastiest screams of punk-rock and hare-krishna dancing marches. Torn between hardcore, cow-punk, folk-rock and acid-rock, the Pixies secreted an original synthesis of the languages of their era's alternative rock. Their sound was both catchy and dissonant, easy and complex.

Surfer Rosa (Elektra, 1988) was one of the masterpieces of the entire decade, one of the most influential records of its time. Almost every song speaks to itself. It is difficult to find a common denominator, beyond extreme creativity, and the usual light-hearted attitude. The songs are songs, but they go against the antithesis of the song because they are always exploded by extreme contrasts, sometimes in an erudite and sometimes insane way. The Pixies start once again from the psychotic garage-rock of Pere Ubu, namely with the emphatic and neurotic Bone Machine, shouted in anguished chorus and pierced by a distorted, shrill and obsessive riff. The surreal posture of Pere Ubu, in a more comic and melodic version, also marks the gag of River Euphrates, hummed in a low voice by Deal on a pounding boogie cadence. The gimmicks of the group are innumerable, as if they were competing to disfigure the melodies in the most ugly way imaginable. Almost all the songs, however, are crossed by a subtle self-parody of ancestry a la Violent Femmes, which further deforms the semantics, up to Oh My Golly, comically punctuated by an acoustic guitar. What captured the imagination of their fans was above all the ability to cram incendiary mixtures of hardcore, heavy metal and hard-rock into the delicate harmonic structures of power-pop. Their refrains, sometimes really elementary, are always gutted by an intrinsically violent logic, by screams and maniacal distortions, by heart-pounding cadences, by a deafening enthusiasm. Each poppy refrain comes with an unusual degree of violence. Something Against You’s epileptic ska raid, sung (or gasped) inside a filter and pierced by coarse riffs, the epically desperate hymn a` la Sex Pistols that is Broken Face, the bewildered pow-wow and valpurgic sabbath of Cactus (with a riff reminiscent of Groover by T.Rex), the frantic choral voodoobilly of Tony's Theme, all have in common the emphatic and caustic tone of Thompson and the hallucinated rhythms of the others. The zenith is possibly Gigantic, a melodic ballad composed and sung by Deal in the style of 1970s songwriters, but then thrown against a wall of Blue Cheer-esque distortions. But perhaps even more evocative is Where Is My Mind, another subtle exercise in controlled violence, a song that crosses Hurdy Gurdy Man-era Donovan and Harvest-era Neil Young, and skewers them in "acid" guitar riffs, but above all propels from metaphysical depths a sinister feminine warble.

Aguably noone before them had ever succeeded in blending the demented and the epic aspects of rock music. The quartet is in great shape. Thompson screams in the most psychotic way, Santiago massacres all harmonies without mercy, the rhythm section is a constant storm. Nirvana would take the lead from this record.

As a result of more pronounced hard-rock inflections, Doolittle's atmosphere (Elektra, 1989) is even more oppressive and spasmodic. The harmonies: more linear, less eccentric. The stubborn humor of the early records turns into cynical determination. The manifesto of the new course is Debaser, an abrasive boogie with the solemn progressions of the Stooges, and Wave of Mutilation, a simple power-pop refrain punctuated in a martial way. This is a much more focused style, which further asserts itself in the robust ballads of No.13 Baby and Gouge Away. Melody reigns above all, as Here Comes Your Man and There Goes My Gun utterly demonstrate. Even in this more tight format, Francis' "monster" personality still has a way of spreading, as he immediately demonstrates in Tame's psychotic tantrum (balanced by another unbridled boogie), in the sardonic ballad a` la Lou Reed of Monkey Gone To Heaven, and in Silver's dismal litany. The antics of the early days are, instead, condensed in a usual whirlwind of pow-wow, roundabouts and voodoobilly, from I Bleed to Dead. Even the quirky gags (Mr Grieves' unbridled vaudeville , and especially the hummed surf of La La Love You) have somehow normalized, leaving the humor on the surface and eliminating the chaos and angularity of the harmonies. Joey Santiago chisels one of his best solos in Hey. More light-hearted and organic, this album loses some of Surfer Rosa's irreverent polish, but it certainly gains in cohesion and catchiness.

The art of the Pixies is among the most innovative of post-punk acts. A simple musical idea is suddenly catapulted to sonic extremes such a deadly sling-like power-trio and then tied to two or three other collateral ideas. The effect is violent and alienating, halfway between the "modern dance" of the Pere Ubu and the transgressive folk-punk of the Violent Femmes.

With Surfer Rosa and Doolittle the Pixies became part of the classic canon. These records established them as the greatest descendents of Pere Ubu, of whom they imitated the art of composing violent and tormented ballads starting from a rock and roll base but detonating it with all sorts of irregularities. Compared to the masters, the Pixies can boast a more "rock" sound, which often flirts with hardrock, but on the other hand they surrender to simpler song structures.

The feeling that both albums leave is that of a collection of fragments, of unfinished ones, of ideas to follow. As ingenious and sublime as they are, they hardly ever seem to come to a conclusion, and make one suspect that, without the walls of distortions and the other multiple attractions/ distractions that animate them, they would be mere powerpop ditties.

However, these albums are capital musical works, two triumphs of the imagination, two festivals of the eccentric, in which the quartet invests a cornucopia of ideas. What makes the band unique is the fact that they are above all a "hard" rock band, unlike almost all the groups that in the past had experimented with the song format of rock music. The Pixies were the first band to carry out this level of experimentation on heavymetal riffs, on the cadences of hardcore, on the screams of garage-rock, and to do so managing not to lose an ounce of the explosive potential of these genres.

However, already on Doolittle a drastic turn was noticeable. The rough violence of the guitars seemed here and there to hide the lack of real inspiration. Francis shifted the emphasis of the sound towards the arrangements and the melodies. Steve Albini (producer) had perhaps helped the first record reach those levels of anguish and ferocity. In some ways Doolittle is the best album of the Pixies, but in others it signals the beginning of their artistic decline.

From Gigantic to Debaser, from Something Against You to Tame, these sonic maelstroms nevertheless raised the standard with which all future generations of alternative rock bands will have to compete. In parallel, from Where Is My Mind and Caribou to Monkey's Gone To Heaven and Wave of Mutilation, Black Francis had been defining a new melodic and "soft" alter ego for the band. (A third evolutionary line was the "zany" one, running from Vamos to Tony's Theme to La La Love You).

And it is this second personality that prevails in Bossanova (Elektra, 1990): the trick that they used on the previous records here becomes an embarrassing misunderstanding. The songs with the best refrains, such as Velouria (which borrows the melody from the Loving Spoonful's Summer In The City), the spirited Allison and Dig For Fire match the heights of the past (although certainly not of Surfer Rosa), but the rest flounders in a rarely effective easy-listening style, which seems to have Roger Waters as the new role model.

The album opens with two novelties (the Ennio Morricone-esque instrumental Cecilia Ann and follows them with a song like Rock Music roared in the register of AC/DC. The album still occasionally hints at steps of "modern dance" a` la Pere Ubu (Is She Weird and Hang The Wire), but it displays all the symptoms of an identity crisis: the "class" is still there, and so is the imagination, and there seems to be no direction. This album is perhaps the worst of their career. Deal, who had been the author of Gigantic, remains a bit on the sidelines (she only chisels the magical Blown Away): Francis' dictatorial management prevails.

Trompe Le Monde (Elektra, 1991) belongs in fact to Francis. This album merges the two alter egos of the ensemble and pushes them to the extreme. On one hand you can hear a hard-rock group (from traces of AC/DC in Planet of Sound to the psychotic hardcore of Sad Punk), on the other hand a pop group (from the bland Motorway To Roswell to the enthralling power-pop of Alec Eiffel), although ever extravagant and comical in its own way. No song respects the canons of the genres to which it pretends to belong. The band engages in a continuous game of puzzles, disguises, illusions, misunderstandings, exchanges of personalities. The Pixies rarely impersonate anyone else (Clash in U Mass , T. Rex in Palace of The Brine): for the most part they impersonate everyone and no one in a "Pirandellian" way.

Perhaps Francis finds his true voice, for just a few seconds, in the psychedelic/ humorous vein of more irregular songs such as the exotic jug of Lovely Day , the musichall sketch of Navajo Know , the surreal watercolor of Bird Dream Of The Olympus Moon, the nursery rhyme of the title-track (sung by Deal). It is only a fleeting glimpse, but for a moment Francis plays the role of the hippie acrobat and in this role he is very elegant.

Frank Black would then give life to a fine solo career, while Santiago and Lovering would form the Martinis, and Deal would prove to be the most authentic talent of the band with the Breeders.

Wave Of Mutilation (4AD, 2004) is a career retrospective, coinciding with a Pixies reunion.

Doolittle 25 (2014) contains the 1989 album plus rarities and two Peel sessions.

The Pixies (Black Francis, Joey Santiago, David Lovering) reformed without Kim Deal (replaced by bassist Paz Lenchantin) and released three EPs later collected on Indie Cindy (2014). The music was an insult to the memory of the original Pixies. The meek folk-rock lullaby Greens and Blues is the only decent addition to their canon. Gently melodic songs like Magdalena and Snakes are only distant memories of the Pixies sound.

Then came the equally disappointing Head Carrier (Play It Again Sam, 2016), with the timid punk-pop Talent and a highlight, Tenement Song, that sounds like performed by an R.E.M. cover band.

Beneath the Eyrie (BMG, 2019) insisted on the same middle-of-the-road pop-rock but only yielded the embarrassing power-pop of Catfish Kate, another atmospheric ballad a` la R.E.M., Daniel Boone, a pale imitation of neurotic rockabilly like Graveyard Hill, and the grungy Nirvana-esque The Long Rider. Nonetheless, it contained the best song of the new era, the anthemic noir Silver Bullet, which could have been on a Stan Ridgway album.