They’re in there, somewhere. But for the better part of an hour, it’s hard to hear or see where. The sound is as murky as the stage is shadowy. The latter is of no consequence – we may trust that Black Francis still resembles an apoplectic pudding, which was always part of the joy of his band – but the former is a problem. Any actual Pixieness one discerns is 40% down to the band and 60% an act of will. This might be intriguing, if they were attempting a Bob Dylan-style disassembly of their own catalogue, whereby the audience is obliged to play Guess the Song. But they’re plainly not.
Eventually your ears adjust to sound the way your eyes do to light. But even when you start to pick out the details, what’s missing is the cohesive force. It’s not because Pixies are concentrating on the latest material. Had it been made by a new band – an entirely new one, that is – you’d say latest album Head Carrier was a pretty good Pixies-influenced record. Besides, they’re doing plenty of the old stuff, the stuff that could melt your face off as if you were standing behind the exhaust of a jet engine, and it’s thudding out flat and muddy. The only highlight is Joey Santiago’s guitar – that mean, spindly, long-taloned thing, clawing its way out of this primordial soup, and tearing streaks in the air.
Somewhere around Magdalena 318, vamped up from its studio version into a pumping, sashaying spell, something kicks in, somehow it gels, and there’s a run of numbers – Tenement Song, Classic Masher, their cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Head On, U-Mass, I’ve Been Tired – that fairly boils out of the PA like magma. These are mostly new or underplayed songs, songs Pixies hadn’t already performed a thousand times before they split, some of them songs Paz Lenchantin had a hand in.
There’s no Monkey Gone to Heaven, no Gigantic (there’s no Kim Deal, so this is probably diplomatic). But it isn’t the hits that come across best anyway. Rock Music and Baal’s Back give us the full-throttle Pixies, with our eardrums wincing in protest and particles of Pixie larynx adhering to the walls. It would be unreasonable to expect two straight hours of that from a band that formed 30 years ago; fairer to hope for a more consistent set. But when they’re good, they do drag you within head-flailing distance of their former greatness.
