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By Scott Thill~Wired
After celebrating the 20th anniversary of its pop-punk classic Doolittle with thankful fans across the pond, the legendary Pixies has returned to America to share its noisy love of surreal sonics and eye-candy visuals. That deafening blast you hear is thousands of Pixies monkeys gone to heaven.
Not that the quartet is being met only by longtime fans. After fracturing in the early ’90s upon the release of blistering full-lengths like Doolittle and Surfer Rosa, the Pixies — guitarist and shrieker Black Francis, bassist and vocalist Kim Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering — are more popular than ever. And judging by the joyous crowd that sold out Wednesday night’s rowdy set at the Hollywood Palladium, the first stop on the U.S. leg of the Pixies’ Doolittle tour that wraps Dec. 1, die-hard fans and new adopters alike have spent time since the band’s 2004 reunion memorizing its brilliant songs and esoteric B-sides.
Doolittle was always the artiest of the band’s releases, from the biblical estrangement of the record’s lyricism to the dark and suggestive sleeve art from graphic designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Simon Larbalestier (exhaustively collected in the Pixies’ recently released mega-box Minotaur).
That spirit was celebrated before the concert with a screening of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s infamous 1928 surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (mashed at right with the Pixies’ “Debaserâ€). The film was met with cheers that escalated into howls once its ending bled into the groovy boogie of the B-side “Dancing the Manta Ray.â€
By the time the Pixies had galloped through rarely performed B-sides like the sinister “Bailey’s Walk†and the spastic “Weird at My School,†the crowd was ready for the A-list.
Francis and crew didn’t disappoint, quickly blazing through Doolittle’s abrasive opener “Debaser,†whose Andalou-inspired surrealist lyrics about “slicing up eyeballs†matched perfectly with the banned silent-film clips of the 1920s compilation Forbidden Images, which was projected on a massive screen behind them. The synesthetic merge brought a measure of high-end live production the band never received in its earlier, less appreciated life. Spearheaded by the Pixies’ trusty lighting designer Myles Mangino and Paul Normandale, and complemented by 11 new films from Judy Jacobs, Tom Winkler, Brent Felix and Melinda Tupling, the viz added eye-candy dimension to Doolittle’s deranged sonics.
Gotta love the pixies!