Reaping the Rewards
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Towards the end of the night on Saturday, the Pixies’s guitarist tried to kill his instrument. Mid-song, Joey Santiago set his guitar down and attacked it with a drumstick. He finally unplugged the instrument entirely and abused the actual amp wire to achieve his perfect cacophonous sound. The band then slid back into the song proper, leaving Santiago’s trademark solo etched into the memory of a new generation.
Those three wonderful minutes epitomized the Pixies’s set, which tore through nearly thirty songs in a little more than 90 minutes. This is the first of five shows the band is playing this week, part of the final leg of their unexpected and highly successful reunion tour.
Between 1987 and 1991, the Pixies released five albums and led the nascent independent rock scene before disbanding. In the decade-plus since, their status as rock-god progenitors of bands like Nirvana and Radiohead has grown into legend. The Pixies left the rock world bruised by the press and each other, but in 2004 they’ve returned as canonized heroes to find their idiosyncrasies embraced as gospel.
The band’s performance delivered on more than its halcyon past, however, as their galvanizing stage presence remains shockingly current. Frank Black, front and center, has clearly found some fountain of laryngeal youth – he tore open favorites like “Debaser,” “Mr. Grieves,” and “Tame” with the same shrieking fury that made them eye-opening 15 years ago. Santiago remained reserved as his guitar spiked the sweet oddity of Black’s melodies.
Kim Deal, spitting out her cigarette to sing, remains a disarmingly warm presence. Her rolling, hooky baselines have always been integral to the Pixies’s mix of pop and harder rock, and she’s still the only one who speaks to the audience.
The Pixies mostly manage to sidestep reunion-tour cliche, but not entirely. “Doolittle” and “Surfer Rosa” supplied over two-thirds of the songs Saturday, as they have throughout the tour. It’s understandable that the band wants to play material from their two most widely recognized albums, but this emphasis comes at crippling expense to their later work, “Bossanova” and “Trompe Le Monde.”
Those two albums represent the direction in which the band was headed when we last saw them, and shortchanging them traps the Pixies in stasis. Whether there is a future LP toward which these albums were moving is not yet clear; regardless, it’s disheartening to be denied nearly half of the band’s recorded work.
Saturday night, however, such gripes were rendered academic and a sense of homecoming prevailed. In 1991, tension between Deal and Black was high; on Saturday, smiling over the crowd before the inevitable encore, the two horsed around.
“Can you do it? You smoked three cigarettes today, wanna stop?” Black asked Deal, and the hall erupted in anticipation. Deal laughed, then led the band into “Gigantic,” which she cowrote. Black joined in the raucously sweet chorus: “Gigantic / Gigantic / A big big love.” Even if this tour is the end of the Pixies’s road, it is not a simple replay, but a new and poignant statement by a band whose music never really went away.