reCAP :: Pixies :: 2014.01.19
Pixies landed at The Capitol Theatre Sunday night and took the audience to their leader. People leaving the venue were heard muttering unintelligible phrases, citing loud colors and super-stellar sonics, and reporting a kind of ethereal dizziness in the head. One woman actually vaporized at one point and then sort of reappeared not far from the vanishing point. She kept asking for directions to the vortex. As in, "Can somebody please tell me how to get back to the vortex? Please?" The band did not seem surprised in the least. In fact they just kept ripping through a list of songs like they were out shopping for alligators. Typical Pixies. The irony about the lost hat trick lady is that the show was sold out and it was really loud. Which was quite choice, I assure you.
Pixies have this ebullient quality which is best connoted by a violent accident with dire consequences which serves to remind us of the strength of the human heart when faced with the consciousness of its body's fragility. Their music has a tendency to destroy your frame of reference, like a chemical reaction, searing the air and obliterating any attempt to put the sound by the wayside, on the back burner, or out of reach. And then it's gone, almost before it got there. In fact, I'm not sure Pixies actually played at The Cap last night or if I dreamed the whole thing up. But the strange thing is that I feel changed. I think we can all agree that you get what you pay for when you get your hands on a nice alligator.
Speaking of trimming hedges, Pixies began the show with "Bone Machine," and then it was light and dark, light and dark, light and dark for what seemed like an eon all wrapped into one second. It was weird. It was strange. It was new. And yet some of those songs are from the last century.
They tore through "U-Mass," "Wave," "Isla," "Monkey," "Brick Is Red," "Cactus," "Dead," "Crackity," "Ana," "Grieves," "D=RT," and "Caribou" before anybody knew what hit them. It was like a train wreck you're in the middle of where you see everything happen before it does and then it happens faster than you can keep up with and then you're sitting there upside down in a tree and you're up to your back end in alligators. And you want it to happen again. And again! Crowd seemed to think so, too. At least in between the alien spacecraft landings in the balcony and the river that burst through the wall and drowned us all for a few minutes. But fans were still attentive during the deluge. Even the alligators thought the music was enjoyable. One of the alligators was quoted, in between puffs, saying, "It's really catchy for music so much about all of the longing in the human soul."
The fires just kept bursting out all over the room. Poof!
In between the sound fracas you could make out some squeaky new songs which Pixies just released over the past year, three of which came out earlier this year. It all happened so fast but they did indeed unwrap "What Goes Boom," "Magdalena," "Andro Queen," "Snakes," "Indie Cindy," and "Greens and Blues." Oh and I totally misplaced the brass band that played out front in order to usher the audience in before all of the hocus-pocus. I'm serious. There really was a brass band. They were marching around the floor covering old songs before a wall of flatscreen TVs were unveiled and the power went on.
So on they went, Pixies, just literally on fire from head to boot, their new bassist, Paz Lenchatin, laying down cover, while Francis and Santiago crumpled up the auditorium and then unruffled it and folded it into an airplane and flew it into the side of a mountain, as Lovering looked on from the tarmac, directing traffic.
"Planet of Sound" closed the encore along with "Hey," and before they played those songs they played "In Heaven," "Ed is Dead," "Vamos," "La La Love You," "Here Comes Your Man," "Debaser," "Gouge Away," and "Where is My Mind?"
And then they left. I don't know what else to say.
