Following hot on the heels of Pixies last official release, ‘Trompe Le Monde’, comes this new four track EP, released without fuss or fanfare. It’s merely twenty-one years since that much-maligned – in the band’s oeuvre, that is – album; before, during and after which squabbling within the band caused an inevitable death to the Pixies. The implosion gifted us a solo career from Frank Black, the sublimity of Kim Deal’s output with The Breeders, and of course a magician to add to the ranks of The Magic Circle in David Lovering. Activity around the band gathered momentum after a triumphant live re-union in 2004, resulting in a new release in the download-only Bam-Thwok, but it seems the troubles of yore may have re-surfaced, and it was announced in June of this year that Kim Deal had left the band.
Many would have considered this the time to call it a day; Deal’s playing style and backing vocals were a key element in Pixies sound, so much so that the band felt the need to draft in a soundalike on backing vocal duties for this year’s Bagboy single. On ‘EP-1’ it takes two men to replace Deal – Bagboy’s Jeremy Dubs returns on vocals, while bass duties are taken up by survivor of The Fall, Simon ‘Ding’ Archer.
A distinctly un-Pixies sounding Andro Queen thumps to life with a booming, Eighties pop production sound. It seems as if a new direction is in the offing, until some of those telling signifiers start to make themselves known – Black Francis intoning in Spanish; abstract imagery delivered in a scat growl; glimpses of ‘Trompe Le Monde’s outer space fixations; Joey Santiago’s Jekyll & Hyde guitar transformations. It’s these very sonic trademarks that mask the fact, initially, that ‘EP-1’ is the sound of a band with little new to offer.
Another Toe In The Ocean is arch-grunge in comparison, driven along by David Lovering’s powerhouse drumming. It grinds along at a fine pace in the formula the band perfected twenty-five years ago; lesser bands have made better stabs at a Pixies pastiche. On each past album you could be guaranteed flashes of genius percussive invention from Lovering, but even he seems to have been affected by the apathy this EP projects. Be thankful for Indie Cindy – here is where it all comes good, a moment of unabashed, hands-to-heaven power pop. The mid-tempo melody is sweet, the vocals too, and Lovering thunders out a tom fill channelled straight from the ‘Surfer Rosa’ days. Santiago’s until now unobtrusive guitar scrapes and scours out of its previous surfy bedrock, and all is not lost.
What Goes Boom is his moment, his guitar serrating right up there with ‘Trompe Le Monde’s harsher segments. It’s that quiet-loud-quiet formula that they own, erring towards the loud, with the irresistible melody of “Grace in her lace and her stocking/ Carryin’ her bass/ She really likes to get rocking” soaring amidst the scattershot vocals from Black. The trouble is he isn’t saying anything worth hearing on ‘EP-1’, and you won’t find anything close to the exquisite, violent imagery that typified Pixies songs and conjured entire visual narratives with a single barked phrase.
This is the work of a band (or the shade of that band) that made a perfect run of records, something that initially obscures the fact that half of these songs are the weakest of their career. It siphons the lifeblood of ‘Bossanova’ and ‘Trompe Le Monde’, watering down the latter’s buzzsaw abrasion, albeit with fleeting, bittersweet glimpses of the band Pixies once were. Take solace in the fact that this is not Pixies anymore. That band died an honourable death with the final strains of The Navajo Know. This is Frank Black and friends, and if we’re honest most of these songs wouldn’t even make it on to a Frank Black solo album. Where ‘Trompe Le Monde’ began the phasing out of Kim Deal, ‘EP-1’ sees the process completed and no-one is the better for it. Except maybe Kim.
If you like this then you might want to check out Irish band Jogging