Skip to main content

Pixies review – punk-rock preachers revisit their gloriously deranged roots

Roundhouse, London
The weird, wild veterans perform their visceral early material and remind us of the flair that established their cult status

If Charles Thompson IV, formerly known as Frank Black and three decades ago as Black Francis, is pleased to be performing his band Pixies’ debut mini-album, Come on Pilgrim, and sublime first full-length, 1988’s Surfer Rosa, in full tonight, it’s hard to tell. His eyes hidden behind shades, he utters barely a syllable not found on those albums, even reading the infamous studio banter from Surfer Rosa off a printout. Any fears he might struggle to evince the deranged fire of his youth, however, are scorched by opener Caribou, slow-dancing to its own infernal, sweltering swoon as Thompson – having successfully located his inner Black Francis – bellows “Repent!” like a brimstone preacher, or a wild beast caught in a bear trap.

These records represent the nascent Pixies sound, before the more accessible later work that saw them tipped for the kind of success Nirvana arguably snatched from their fingertips. It’s wild music, still deeply weird 30 years on: Thompson screaming, often in Spanish, of lust and sex and insanity over mescal-soaked, stiletto-wielding punk-rock. The songs of Surfer Rosa in particular conjure a blackly comic fever-dream of South America, like some Tijuana Bible retelling of Touch of Evil. Just the sort of thing a 20-year-old gringo would cook up after a year in Puerto Rico.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PErAoB
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more