For someone who worshipped at the Altar of Pixies for much of the ’90s (c’mon pilgrim, let’s start any/all conversations about the mesmerizing, epic truths contained within Doolittle and Bossanova), I can count the total number of times I picked up their 2014 reunion album, Indie Cindy, on the fingers of a single hand: once. That was enough. It sure sounded like Pixies, but the songwriting just didn’t rise to the nosebleed-altitude level of awesomeness that longtime fans had dreamed of for the preceding two decades-plus that kept the band apart. And for that, I laid much of the blame directly at the feet of frontman Black Francis.
Which is what makes their seventh album (and second post-reunion), Head Carrier, such a pleasant surprise: Now that my expectations have been adjusted, they’ve gone and annihilated them all over again. What I loved most about Pixies was that uniquely hi/lo thing they did so well: loud/soft dynamics, lyrics that boomeranged between space aliens and Spanish phrases to obsessions with sex, death and spiritual wreckage, and their peculiar sonic collage of surf rock, Neil Young in Crazy Horse mode and pure punk.
This album flaunts ’em all; “Baal’s Back,” a furious Old Testament rant; “Might As Well Be Gone” and “Plaster of Paris,” as classic a pair of ’90s pop tropes as they’ve recorded since that decade; even “All I Think About Now,” a cracker featuring lead vocals from new bassist Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, Zwan, Silver Jews) that forms something of a mash note to the dearly departed Kim Deal. This is what we were waiting for; if the devil was six, then god is seven.
—Corey duBrowa
