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Originally posted by dayanara

Frank Black is fat, and, from the mezzanine at least, he looked bald.

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In the nineteen-eighties, the Pixies created an idiosyncratic version of rock. The group’s songwriter and lead singer, Frank Black, calling himself Black Francis, wrote surreal, violentlyrics, and then squawked them over minimal guitar rock that went from very soft to very loud very quickly. (Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain once said that the band’s biggest hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was essentially a “rip-off” of the Pixies.) The Pixies had minor hits and some videos on MTV, but nothing to match the success of, say, Nirvana. Last year, after more than ten years of writing music in separate bands and nursing a mysterious feud, the group’s members reunited. Their audience seems to have expanded; tickets for Pixies shows were selling for more than three hundred dollars on eBay during an eight-night stand in December at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Several times that week, I passed people on the street quoting Pixies lyrics to one another. Record stores played their songs in the same way that a government might hoist a flag for a visiting foreign dignitary, as if it were a civic duty.

Never a devout fan, I was surprised by how coherent and forceful the Pixies sounded at the Hammerstein show. The band took the stage as the theme from a spaghetti Western played, a comically sinister tune in keeping with the onstage décor: three black, leafless trees, which nicely evoked the long-suffering survivor.

The Pixies spent the eighties singing about menacing natural phenomena—lethal sludge, mutilating waves, holes in the sky. Now they look like science teachers, and seem more at home in their geeky, aggressively strange songs. Frank Black is fat, and, from the mezzanine at least, he looked bald. The guitarist, Joey Santiago, is quite trim, but he also lacks hair. Thickened with age, the bassist, Kim Deal, stood rooted to her spot. In fact, hardly anyone onstage moved, and the banter was limited to a few remarks. Yet this static tableau concealed a giddy tension, and as the show unfolded it became clear that the Pixies are much better live today than they were the first time around. The college-boy surrealism works now that Black isn’t trying so hard to sell it with all the winking and mugging that make the band’s early videos almost unwatchable. Santiago turned the hoariest part of any rock show—the electric-guitar solo—into a vaudevillian magic act. Parking his guitar on a stand in the middle of the stage, he used a drumstick to coax sound from the instrument without touching it. After the last song, instead of retreating backstage in order to reëmerge triumphantly for an encore, the musicians simply walked back and forth and waved to the crowd. Then Black, at the microphone, asked Deal, “Do you wanna do another one?” “Sure, why not!” she replied, and the band launched into “Gigantic,” a vast, thrumming song driven by Deal’s fierce, tiny voice.

But, in one sense, the Pixies have it easy. They broke up in 1993, have written only one song since, and never made a bad record. Their set list draws exclusively from five recorded albums, which is just as fans would have it. Acts that hang on past the twenty-year mark must juggle the new and the old in a live setting. R.E.M.’s show at Madison Square Garden in November illustrated how tricky that can be...

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