by Dan Solomon September 22, 2010
Pixies at Austin Music Hall
With that out of the way: How is a Pixies show when it’s time to talk about the money? Well, the novelty of simply hearing the band perform has passed—since the reunion, it has played nearly 300 shows, including two in Austin. It’s no longer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a band previously thought to be forever dead. So what does it have to offer?
Doolittle, mostly. As with the rest of the dates on the Pixies’ current tour, the band ran through its 1989 breakthrough LP front-to-back—B-sides included—at the Austin Music Hall Tuesday night. And that’s almost enough. The songs on Doolittle were great 21 years ago, and still sound fresh today. “Wave Of Mutilation,” “Gouge Away,” and “Here Comes Your Man” are all bona fide classics, and those never go out of style. So it’s too bad that the band playing them seemed so bored.
The “play a classic album live” trend makes a lot of sense: Concert tickets are expensive, artists have deep catalogs, and there’s always the chance that whoever you’ve ponied up the cash to see is going to choose to regale you with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played with his teeth instead of giving you what you’d hoped to hear. On paper, the idea’s great, and there are few albums that make worthier choices for this type of performance than Doolittle. The downside, though, is equally significant. When a band is playing the same set list every single night of a tour, and it was all determined by decisions that its members made two decades ago, there’s little room for spontaneity or improvisation—especially when they’re not even pretending to be motivated by a desire to make art anymore. What you’re left with when that happens, then, is something like the world’s best Pixies cover band.
That’s not such an awful thing; it’s a disappointment, if what appealed to you about Doolittle in the first place was the passion. But when Thompson was last playing music that he was passionate about, he struggled to fill small clubs. Instead, he’s able to play songs that he wrote when he was 24, exactly as they should sound. The closest the Doolittle show ever comes to deviating from the formula is when Thompson sings the words to “Hey” slower than they appear on the projection screen behind him. (Thus throwing off the game of audience karaoke.) No one in the band seems to mind playing the songs, and even a dispassionate rendition of “Debaser” rocks. The show was obviously carefully choreographed and stage-managed, with the projections offering moody complements to the music (and, okay, the occasional shill for a $25 copy of that evening’s performance to take home with you) and the fake fog occasionally so thick that the band all but disappeared. Nonetheless, the lack of enthusiasm coming from the stage was palpable.
As the band came back out for its second encore, a surprising energy shift occurred. At this point, the Music Hall’s house lights were up, and the band started its cover of Neil Young’s “Winterlong.” Thompson and Deal appeared to have fun playing a song they weren’t contractually obligated to perform, and the formal stagecraft was punctured by the lighting, making the giant warehouse of a venue feel almost club-like. By the time the band members went into Surfer Rosa’s “Break My Body,” being in a great rock band like the Pixies looked like a fun way to earn a paycheck again, and that’s really the best of both possible worlds—for the band members and the people who came to see them.
Pixies Latest News