The sad spoils of a job in music criticism: I am finally given the chance to review a new release by the Pixies, and it's this. There is a bitter personal irony in the moment, a momentary affirmation of a fear that anyone chasing the culture industry contends with occasionally: I got here too late. Anything worth covering has already happened.
I don’t really feel that way, of course, but this quickie EP, dropped into the world two days ago, prompts bleak thoughts, at least while it’s on. It’s mercifully brief-- four songs, one, “Indie Cindy”, repeated in a “clean” version-- but considering it is the first new release bearing the Pixies name since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, it leaves deep marks. Nothing in these four faceless, fatuous alt-rock songs distinguishes them as the music of the Pixies. Nothing, in fact, distinguishes them at all. Kim Deal is absent, having left the band, but no one else-- not Santiago or Lovering or even Frank Black-- seem to have shown up either.
From the moment Black’s bleating vocal take begins on “Andro Queen”, it’s painfully clear: There is no Pixies in this Pixies. No tension between preschool giddiness and grad-school sophistication, between finger-painting pop and Bunuel-quoting lyrics; no seesaw between playfulness and menace; no intimations of terror. There is no alien shimmer to the guitars or the vocal melodies. The cheerily plodding power chords and excruciating rhyme scheme of “Another Toe in the Ocean” recall Green Album-era Weezer, or Lit. The turgid crunch of “What Goes Boom” summons uncomfortable memories of Papa Roach covering “Gouge Away”. This music wasn’t just written or recorded without any regard to the quality of the Pixies legacy, it was done so without regard to songwriting quality at all. If one of these songs had started playing over the credits of an American Pie knockoff that never reached theaters, you would not blink.
For anyone with even a mild investment in the music the Pixies made in the 1980s-- which, considering how far their influence spread after Kurt Cobain leaked them into the world’s mainstream water supply, is a fair amount of people-- the utterly anonymous sound of EP-1 is shocking. On “Indie Cindy”, Black rants and mutters lines like “You put the cock in cocktail, man/ I put the tail in wait, watch me walk." It's terrible, but it's possibly the most memorable turn of phrase he manages. The rest streams by like multiplex air-conditioning.
It's hard not to take the EP's failure personally. If not for the once-faraway promise of the Pixies, and bands like the Pixies, I would almost certainly never have wandered down the foolish siren-song path to music-critic employment in the first place. When I saw them play after they reunited, nine years ago, I distinctly remember the thrill, shared by the other twentysomethings around me, as we all sang along to “Hey”. This moment, maybe, wasn’t supposed to be. I was cheating death, or time, and like any good monkey’s-paw cautionary tale, it would certainly backfire in some way. And so it has. Very soon, no one will remember much about this EP, or that it even exists. But it’s a minor tragedy that it was released, and it’s almost enough to make me wish the reunion and even that magical show I saw never happened.
