During all those years that fans clamored for new music following the band’s 2004 reunion, who could have predicted that expectations for a new Pixies album would ever sink so low? After nearly a decade spent growing rusty on the reunion circuit, the band deflated what little excitement remained following Kim Deal’s departure with Indie Cindy, a comeback that not only failed to recreate their old mystique, but struggled to even understand what made the band so alluring in the first place. The sinister spark, the mischief, that giddy confusion they stirred with their blur of candy and sadism—it was totally absent, replaced by an at best anonymous, at worst obnoxious shrug of secondhand tics.
At least things couldn’t get any worse. It didn’t buy them back much goodwill, but 2016’s Head Carrier was perfectly fine, a serviceable effort roughly on par with the average Frank Black album. And over the last few years the band’s concerts have begun to show signs of life again, thanks in part to replacement bassist Paz Lenchantin, whose happy-to-be-here presence sets an example for her tired bandmates. Having new material to perform doesn’t hurt, either. It at least offers the group a chance to mix it up a bit after years of bleeding the same old Doolittle staples dry.
The Pixies’ modest rebound continues on their pleasant, undemanding, and completely respectable new album Beneath the Eyrie. It won’t win back scorned fans who took the band’s fall from greatness as a personal betrayal, yet it comes closer to conjuring the gleeful chill of the Pixies’ classic albums than anything they’ve released since reuniting. There are moments where, if you zone out just a little bit, it feels like you’re listening to some Bossanova B-sides that you somehow missed. The Pixies have finally made an album that scratches the itch for new Pixies music.
It’s got some rippers on it, too. The romping “Graveyard Hill” (one of several tracks co-written by Lenchantin, an eager presence throughout the album) sets up Black Francis for some of the freest, most feral barks he’s unleashed in two decades. “The Long Rider,” meanwhile, is the album’s big earworm, and prime radio fodder on the off chance alternative stations decide a new Pixies single might be something they’re into. It’s made from recycled parts—repurposed pieces of “Velouria,” mostly—but it lifts off in a way few classic Pixies imitations do.
The band is also learning how to make change work in their favor. Francis’ slithery, sexual energy of yore has given way to an old-man crotchetiness. Instead of feigning the mystique that now eludes him, he leans into candor, touching on his recent divorce in unguarded terms, at least on the tracks where he isn’t singing about witches or mythical half-human sea creatures. The blustery opener “Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain” and the naked “Ready for Love” cast him as heartbroken and cursed, picking up where his confessional final effort with the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, left off. Even the spritely jangle of “Bird of Prey” does little to temper the resentful bite of Francis’ lyrics. “You’ve stolen my tomorrow/So I come for it today/You stole it when you stole my yesterday,” he sings in a smoldering, Leonard Cohen growl.
The Pixies recorded Beneath the Eyrie at a creepy old church, which must have helped juice the gothic sound that they’re going for. Of course, in their prime this band could make even the most sterile studio sound haunted, but after two records grasping for ambience, it’s nice to hear a Pixies album with a moody sense of place again. It’s weird that “better than nothing” became the bar for what was once one of the most celebrated bands of their era, but if it’s a choice between more records as solid, if unspectacular, as Beneath the Eyrie or nothing, the Pixies might as well keep them coming. It’s been a long time since this band had anything left to lose.
Buy: Rough Trade
