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dayanara
* Dog in the Sand *
Australia
1811 Posts |
 Posted - 11/15/2004 : 12:02:59
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http://www.suntimes.com/output/rock/cst-ftr-pixies15.html
Pixies sail into town on a wave of adulation
November 15, 2004
BY JEFF VRABEL Staff Reporter Advertisement
The Pixies' reunion concert on Saturday night, the first of five at the Aragon Ballroom, may go down as the ticket of the year, but it kicked off with all the fanfare of a bus ride: "Hi!" welcomed Kim Deal, behind a warm little smirk.
And with humility out of the way, for the following 90 minutes, the Pixies' desperately awaited reunion did everything it was supposed to do, revived everything it was supposed to revive, relegated over a decade's worth of alt-radio replicas to their places and helped put the Boston quartet's legacy squarely before more mainstream eyes.
It's a legacy that apparently required a little perspective to be appreciated. When tickets went on sale back in February, could anyone have predicted that these guys would be one of the top stories of the year? Effectively dormant since 1992, and never that big a commercial success to begin with, the Pixies are enjoying a reunion tour -- held in the midst of 2004's notoriously weak concert economy -- that's as pleasingly improbable as they come. Saturday night opened an unprecedented run at the Aragon that will move about 22,500 tickets. That's a United Center-size show, a Tweeter Center-size show, a show that's -- OK, fine, gigantic -- all for a band without a label and exactly one new track since the first Bush administration.
Not that those venues would have suited this set, a blitzkrieg of raging pre-alternative surf-punk that neatly brushed aside that 12-year layoff. The Pixies need the relatively short-range capability of an Aragon to properly unleash salvos such as "U-Mass," "Gouge Away" and "Subbacultcha." (Several years north of moshing age, the packed house replaced its flannel and fury with good ol' reverent head-nodding.)
For all the expectations, the band never disappointed (though the anticipatory mood was such that anything short of an all-Manilow covers set would have probably sufficed). Sure, there's a perceptible sense of time passed -- the legendarily everyman-ish Pixies look less like rock stars than ever, and Frank Black spent the evening in a sweater vest, for Pete's sake. And the band was just scraggly and loose enough to reveal a realness that comes only with bands of a certain vintage.
As if to ease into their weeklong stay, the Pixies began with a slow-burning, mostly acoustic hors d'oeuvre. Deal simmered on "In Heaven," her sweet voice masking a sense of menace and purpose, before Black took over for the "U.K. Surf" version of "Wave of Mutilation" and "Where Is My Mind?," which gorgeously swirled Joey Santiago's crying guitar with Deal's sweet harmonies.
But then Deal's beach-blanket basslines grooved into "Blown Away," and the band barely paused to take a breath. Black's alien howling defied the laws of time on "Mr. Grieves" and "Planet of Sound," the latter featuring some of Santiago's fiercest guitar and served as the night's best example of the sound Nirvana so famously copped to copping.
Deal and Black's wonderfully uneasy harmonies leapt off the stage on a fierce "I Bleed," and Santiago and drummer David Lovering drove "Caribou" from dirge verses into explosive choruses.
Thankful to a fault, the Pixies left no hit unturned, but rather than a best-ofs parade, each song was afforded furious life. "Bone Machine" achieved proper pummeling intensity, a fired-up "Crackity Jones" led into the sweetly humming "Monkey Gone to Heaven," and "Velouria" was pure melodic melancholy. Later on, the schizophrenic "Debaser" swooped into the full-rawk version of "Mutilation," a fine treat for the lucky ticket-landers of Night One. And the giddy, psychedelic pop of "Here Comes Your Man" was saved for the encore, a gummy, sun-kissed dessert to follow the raucousness before.
One strange after-effect with a band of the Pixies' vast legacy is how their sound holds up; after a decade-plus of bands that have stolen from the Pixies, there's a quaintness to hearing the genuine article, like finally watching "Casablanca" after hearing its most famous lines referenced for years. But one gets the sense that legacy preservation is the last of the Pixies' concerns. There's a refreshing simplicity to their comeback, an almost wistfully nostalgic glimpse of a former age, and it's good to them have back. And the best part is, they'll be here all week.
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