Indie rock – finally right: Pixies

The new Pixies album “The Night the Zombies Came” is here. And it’s good. It took Charles Thompson or Black Francis or Frank Black quite a long time to realize that he was no longer a young, wild and innovative indie rock musician. His band was never really that big anyway. Except in Great Britain, where people liked the weird rock music from Boston.

In 1989 they entered the island’s top ten albums for the first time with their second album “Doolittle”. In the USA they remained more of an insider tip. What may have been particularly difficult for the rather ambitious Thompson was that although he wrote the songs, played guitar and sang, the star of the band was the charismatic bassist Kim Deal. In 1991 the band fell apart after their fourth album. Thompson started a euphoric solo career as “Frank Black,” but it increasingly stalled in the mid-90s. Kim Deal founded the band Breeders. After initial success, her career became increasingly bogged down.

But the Pixies received two gifts from fate. The first was when Kurt Cobain claimed he was trying to write a Pixies song and came up with “Smells like Teen Spirit.” The second was David Fincher’s film Fight Club, which gave the Pixies their second career highlight years after their end. The previously largely unknown song “Where is my mind?” refined its finale, as if the film had been made just for this song.

Without this film, no rooster would have crowed for the Pixies, but now the royalties swelled into a broad stream of money. Still, it took five years before Deal and Thompson could bring themselves to accept this gift and tour together again. The tension between the two was by no means resolved, as Deal claimed to be on an equal footing with Thompson as band leader because of her enduring popularity. In 2013, she left the band in frustration and was easily replaced by Kim Shattuck. In 2014, the band’s first new material since 1991 was released with the rather rough album “Indie Cindy”. The songs on it were an artistically rather careless gesture of refusal. Shattuck was replaced relatively quickly by bassist Paz Lenchantin.

Only now did a chaos troupe of self-centered profile neurotics become a real band that no longer played friendly, amateurish rumble music, but developed its very own sound. Joey Santiago’s howling solo guitar was finally given the space in the band’s sound that it always deserved. Lenchantin, a virtuoso, classically trained bassist, didn’t even try to imitate Kim Deals’ scrappy counterpart. She enriched the songs with more complex bass figures. Not to be forgotten is David Lovering’s complex drumming. And Charles Thompson is still the undisputed boss, but he has opened up to the skills of his fellow musicians. He also no longer wants to be an innovative rocker, but rather earn good money and grow old in peace with his fans.

Now the fifth album since the reunification, the ninth album in total, has been released. After “Beneath the Eyrie” (2019), it is the best of the new albums. This is also because the deserving Paz Lenchantin left the group and a new woman, Emma Richardson, joined. But it’s less their bass that enriches the band’s sound than their singing. Her fantastic voice can be heard on almost all songs. Kim Deal’s cool vocals had a significant influence on the band’s first four albums; Richardson sings completely differently, but takes on Deal easily. Richardson’s voice is used beautifully, especially in “Hypnotized” and “Mercy me”. Thematically, the album follows zombies, headless chickens and other scary themes in the old Pixies tradition and is successful in this respect too.

Pixies: »The Night The Zombies Came« (Universal)

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