PIXIES RETURN WITH NEW TUNES
Alt- rock icons stave off curse of over- familiarity
By the time Pixies entered a studio in Wales in 2012 to record their first batch of new songs since reforming in 2004, the quartet’s reunion phase had lasted longer than their original incarnation. It was a testament to the enduring power of Pixies’ singular surf/ punk/ noise/ etc. strangeness: eight years of relatively consistent activity powered by a relatively slim catalogue, without anyone in the band developing a taste for sequined jumpsuits.
“The act has never been presented as an oldies act, and the audience has never seemed to represent that kind of a vibe,” frontman Black Francis ( Charles Thompson) said in a recent phone interview. “I’m not saying we’re the most current band, but considering we hadn’t put out a record in 20 years, we didn’t have a very nostalgic feel, if I may say so, in the atmosphere of the concert hall.”
The iconoclasts found ways to stave off overfamiliarity — when a tour centred on the beloved 1989 album Doolittle hit Metropolis in 2011, the concert perversely began with a clutch of B- sides — but with every year, the lack of new material ( save the 2004 throwaway Bam Thwok) became harder to ignore.
“There’s an agent of ours in the U. K.; I always like to say that there’s no fifth member, but if there’s a sixth member, he’s the one. Basically, we haven’t done anything without his inside approval,” Francis said. “We were getting messages from him like, ‘ You’re reaching the end of this particular period. No one dreamed it would go on for this long. You might want to think about some new music.’”
The thought had crossed their minds before; in interviews as far back as 2006, Francis had said bassist Kim Deal’s hesitation to enter the studio was the main roadblock. “If Kim had continued to be reticent about the whole affair and Member No. 6 was still saying, ‘ No, you guys are fine playing the golden oldies,’ who knows? Maybe we would have debated the whole concept another five years.”
By extension, maybe Deal would have stayed in Pixies. Shortly after they began work at Rockfield Studios in Wales with Gil Norton — who produced three of Pixies’ four full- length albums and was thought to be “the one person who was familiar enough with the personalities and could navigate what was perhaps going to be an interesting time” — the bassist made an abrupt departure.
Considering her famously fractious relationship with Francis during the band’s original run, and the singer’s admission that the sessions had been “pretty slow- going and a little tense,” one might assume a heated argument sent Deal heading for the door.
“People are going to see ‘ tension’ and they’re going to think, ‘ Oh, the band wasn’t getting along. They were fighting.’ No. But if you have the sense someone is unhappy, it becomes tense. … How long is this going to last? Are they having a bad time? How can we make it so we’re all having a good time? So when they finally leave, you’re talking about a multilayered emotional thing going on. Someone who’s been in the band from the beginning, for 25 years, has left. You feel gutted. But in the short term, in the now, there was a sense of, ‘ OK, this person doesn’t really want to be here; now they’re gone. That’s a relief, because we all want to be here. We can get on to the thing that we want to do, which is make music.’”
Francis says it took around two days for him, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering to decide on continuing the sessions without Deal. “It wasn’t like she said, ‘ I’m leaving and this has to stop.’ She just said, ‘ I’m leaving. Good luck.’”
Deal’s departure wasn’t disclosed until June, nor was the existence of new Pixies material. A single, Bagboy, surfaced two weeks after the announcement that Deal had left the band; a four- song EP with the factory- stamped title EP1 followed in September, again without advance notice. The pattern was reinforced with this month’s guerrilla release of a second EP. ( Guess the title.)
So Pixies have lost a member, but not the element of surprise. Francis wouldn’t divulge whether more EPs will follow, but his tally of the number of songs yielded by the Rockfield sessions suggests at least one more is in the pipeline.
Before her departure, Deal had a direct influence on at least two tracks. EP1’ s Indie Cindy, which subverts the iconic quiet/ loud Pixies template with a jagged verse and smooth chorus, started with “a fairly intricate arrangement, and then Kim had an idea to make the arrangement even more complicated.”
EP2’ s valedictory Greens and Blues was conceived as a possible successor to Gigantic, one of Deal’s few lead vocals in the catalogue, as the standard set- closer. “I think Kim was kind of growing weary of singing that. It was just becoming too much shtick.” ( Francis says he won’t perform Gigantic without Deal in the band, “at least at this point. I think it might come off as a little cheeky.”)
The bassist’s chair has been swivelling in Deal’s absence. After Simon Archer quickly filled in for the recording sessions, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs was recruited as a touring member. The association was short- lived: She was dismissed in November, replaced by Paz Lenchantin ( A Perfect Circle, Zwan), whose active duty began this week. Shattuck and Lenchantin have helped Pixies retain the yin- yang of a female harmonist offsetting Francis’s unsettled stutters and shrieks — a prized part of the band’s chemistry. (“Nothing against dudes.”)
“A few months … was enough time for us to assess and go, ‘ You know what? This is not going to work out in the big picture.’ It doesn’t really matter what the reasons are, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re inappropriate to even talk about. Every band has reasons why somebody doesn’t work out.”