CONCERT REVIEW: Pixies At The Tower

Pixies Doolittle Tour

MEcropped2.jpgBY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The classic album concert — wherein a storied and beloved band reunites to perform its career-making album beginning to end along with all the attendant B-sides — is the latest attempt by the music biz to plug the gaping hole at the bottom of the money pool, as was the case when the Pixies performed its 1989 art-brut classic, Doolittle, at the the Tower Theater Tuesday night. The show kicked off with a screening of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, which was apropos for at least two reasons. First, Pixies frontman Black Francis invokes the movie’s title on the shrieking chorus of “Debaser”, Doolittle’s lead-off track. Secondly, much like Doolittle, the film’s lurid imagery (razor-sliced eyeballs, skin-crawling ants and pianos filled with dead donkeys) retains the power to shock and confound all these years later. As the Pixies ably demonstrated, Doolittle still plants the freak flag in alt-rock’s twilight zone, where lullabies meet blasphemy, waves of mutilation pound forests into driftwood, Uriah hits the crapper and all good monkeys go to heaven.  MORE

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