Pixies – EP2 | Review

Josh Carvel brings you another  of his music reviews as he casts aside his fanboy status to take an honest look at the new release from Pixies.

Pixies released a new EP last September, and now they’ve followed it up with ‘EP2’ – a surprise release last week to bring in the new year. The low-down is that it’s a lot of fun and should be perfectly enjoyable for most fans, but of course it’s not classic Pixies material.

I am a fan of Pixies, but first and foremost I’m a fan of their 1989 album ‘Doolittle’. This makes it hard to dissect this new EP, made almost twenty five years later without original bass player and co-vocalist Kim Deal.

‘Doolittle’ had a ‘cleaner’ sound than anything the band had done up to that point, but still it had everything that made Pixies great: bizarre, dark, surrealist lyrics, a musical mishmash of (among  other things) folk, hardcore punk, surf rock and rock and roll, that famous quiet-loud dynamic and a talent for melody when they needed it.

I guess if you’re a fan of Pixies, you have to say which Pixies you’re a fan of. ‘Come on Pilgrim’ captured the band’s trademark style, but it was also raw, messy and challenging. For ‘Surfer Rosa’, the band brought in Steve Albini to produce the album (and his work inspired Kurt Cobain to hire him for Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’). One result of this was that huge snare drum sound that became strongly associated with the band’s style.

‘Bossanova’ and ‘Trompe Le Monde’, on the other hand, had plenty of quality songs, but the band’s sound was getting more and more clean-cut. A break-up, a re-union and finally Kim Deal’s departure earlier this year brings up to date.

So naturally, the arrival of new Pixies single ‘Bagboy’ and their ‘EP 1’ generated a lot of attention. But ‘EP1’ is not exactly what fans expected. Front-man Black Francis seemed to have suddenly become enamoured with heavily effects-laden vocals and a fairly bland, non-confrontational chugging guitar sound, heard on tracks ‘Andro Queen’ and ‘Another Toe in the Ocean’. For me, it just seemed too incongruous with the traditional Pixies aesthetic.

The exception was the great single ‘Indie Cindy’, which married an abrasive, heavily chromatic verse with a dreamy mid-tempo chorus: this was sort of stark contrast we expected in a Pixies song. It was simply so much better than anything else on the EP.

Thankfully, EP2 seems like a stronger record. Opener ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ proves that no, the cowbell is not yet dead, deploying this most classic of rock percussion choices to great effect before the song leaps into an irrepressibly catchy chorus, which – you guessed it – goes ‘BLUE EYED HEXEEEEE’ over and over. The song is heavy and full of energy, Black Francis gets his scream on once again and Joey Santiago even gets to knock off a typically shambolic guitar solo before it’s over.

‘Magdalena’, meanwhile, fulfils the quota of Spanish and Biblical lyrical connections which is apparently necessary for any Pixies release. As for the music, it’s an an atmospheric mid-tempo rocker and sits well with the rest of the material.

‘Greens and Blues’ is surprisingly upbeat and rocks a triumphant guitar riff in the ‘simple but effective’ vein. The chord structure is quintessentially Pixies and Black Francis finally confirms what we always suspected: ”I said I’m human but you know I lied/I’m only visiting this shore”.

‘Snakes’ promises to be the most interesting cut on the record, opening with some nifty dual guitar interplay and a deliciously dark verse that alternates between a 4/4 and 3/4 time signature, but then it’s let down by the oddly radio-friendly chorus, which sound pretty much exactly like one of those dull copy-and-paste choruses from any of the Foo Fighters’ most recent records – or it would, if it wasn’t about snakes which are ‘Coming to your town/In tunnels underground’.

At the end of the day, it’s impossible to ignore the gap left by Kim Deal (especially after her touring replacement Kim Shattuck was recently fired from the band). The prominent basslines and falsetto backing vocals provided too much of the Pixies’ dynamic for them to fully function without it. Furthermore, it seems that the mammoth snare sound of yesteryear is sadly gone for good. Still, it’ll be a while before I get ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’, ‘Blues and Greens’ and ‘Indie Cindy’ out of my head – those songs are worth checking out at least.