Pixies fans rejoice! The band you love, the band of Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa has returned! What’s that you say? That the Pixies came back four years ago and that they also released three other pretty damn good records? Ah! That is where you are wrong. See, after the release of Surfer Rosa, the Pixies fell victims to an insidious RIAA plot to influence music for the last 15 years. The Pixies as you know them were sent back in time, to nineteenth-century Appalachia via Reagan era Star Wars technology. Then the RIAA, with the backing of Bono, created a fake Pixies, which toured the world and begat Nirvana, Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Offspring, and Nickelback.
As I said, insidious.
How do I know this? Well, the Pixies are back from the past and are renamed O’Death. They just released an album called Broken Hymns, Limbs, and Skin. It is obviously the follow up to Surfer Rosa. The same framework of frantic semi-acoustic punk with a yelping frontman exists but it has suffered an obvious maturation. Lost is the biblical focus, replaced by an obsession over traditional folk and bluegrass, picked up from their stay in old-timey Appalachia. The Pixies/O’Death are now dominated by fiddle and banjo and even go slow on some songs. If the hipsters were to have a hoedown, this would likely be the soundtrack.
Tracks such as “Low Tide” and “Fire on Peshtigo” will make you thrash as hard as anything from the first half of Surfer Rosa and are probably even catchier. Towards the second half of the album O’Death even begins to sound almost like A Silver Mt. Zion, something the original, circa 1987 Pixies could never have come close to appropriating (never mind that A Silver Mt. Zion wouldn’t exist for another 15 years).
Let me be the first to welcome the Pixies back to the future. Whatever name they choose to be known by, I hope they know that their presence in our time and space is greatly appreciated. We need them.
Score: 5/5
O’Death – “Lowtide”
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