Pixies – Live in 2015

Pixies : Live

Maybe no act has had a career quite like the Pixies. Emerging out of Massachusetts between the indie-punk local scenes of the eighties and grunge-punk boom of the early nineties, they drew from the former and were drawn from by the latter, but never achieved major success in their native country, and broke-up. Singer/guitarist Black Francis renamed himself Frank Black and had a long solo career (QRO live review), while singer/bassist Kim Deal formed the briefly very successful Breeders (QRO live review), only for them, guitarist Joey Santiago, and drummer David Lovering to reunite at Coachella in 2004. That reunion basically began the alt-reunion trend of the twenty-first century, as seemingly every band that ever had a hit on 120 Minutes or were once billed as ‘The next R.E.M.’ have found a second life, as their original fans want to see them (again or for the first time) & kids too young the first time around have discovered them thanks to iTunes.

But even here, the Pixies charted their own course. At first, the reunion was strictly nostalgia, as Deal & once-again-Francis also kept up their other careers, and that nostalgia seemed to get a bit long in the tooth. Then Deal left – and the Pixies released their first new record in two decades, Indie Cindy (QRO review). This Pixies 2.0, or 3.0, or whatever you want to call it, came to Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre (QRO venue review) on Thursday, May 28th.

The Pixies played Kings right after two nights at the equally classy Beacon Theatre (QRO venue review) in Manhattan, as this is a band that has earned the right to play upscale concert halls – and this is a fan base that has earned the right to not be squeezed in a general admission scrum. On stage, Pixies shows don’t feature much banter at all (the most was Lovering miming that he was done before returning for the requisite encore – there’s more between-song talking on the album Surfer Rosa), but that time is filled up by fitting in more songs – Kings featured twenty-nine in total. The night naturally had a lot of Indie Cindy pieces, which fit in well sonically on the set list (see below), even if strong numbers like “Snakes” couldn’t get the same rapturous response from the audience as older ones. Of the classics, what was noticeable was that the band leaned almost entirely towards the earliest of them, first records Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa, and Doolittle, with none from Bossanova and only two from final original run record Trompe le Monde – post-break-up Complete B-Sides got two itself (albeit they were their cover of David Lynch’s “In Heaven (Lady In the Radiator Song)” to open the evening, and the slower ‘U.K. Surf’ version of Doolittle’s “Wave of Mutilation” – whose proper American version was the encore return along with Doolittle’s “Debaser”, the two closest things the band had to hit singles in their original run).

Frank Black Francis But the Pixies have enough strong songs that even with all the pieces they fit in at Kings, there were more that one wanted to hear (“Another Toe In the Ocean”, “Planet of Sound”, “Into the White”, “Dig For Fire”, “Monkey Gone To Heaven”, “Bone Machine”, and “I’ve Been Tired” come to mind). To get all that you wanted, you would probably have had to make all three shows. ‘Cause can’t get enough Pixies…