First proper new Pixies song since the breakup back in ’93 (the 2004 Zevon cover and the instrumental “Boom Thwack” don’t quite count). Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis) has not lost his capacity to be off-puttingly weird and stingy with the fuzzy pop hooks that offset the horror, the horror and made them irresistible back in the day. The fact that Kim Deal almost saves this song with her trademark angel-of-death vocal on the chorus only makes her recent departure all the more regrettable. Right at the 4:30 mark it sounds for a second or two like the Pixies are about to take wing on one of their trademark interstellar guitar overdrives (a la “Into The White” or “Wave Of Mutilation”) but alas the song just ends without ever leaving the Starbucks where it was written. — JONATHAN VALANIA
PREVIOUSLY: 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
PREVIOUSLY: Dissecting Doolittle with Black Francis
PREVIOUSLY: Burying The Hatchet With Black Francis