Pixies - EP-1 EP-1… Brand new EP-1sode

Review: Pixies – EP-1

Published on September 9th, 2013 | Jonny Abrams

This section is usually cordoned off for album reviews, but Pixies aren’t just any old band. It was of course Rocksucker’s profound hope that EP-1, a brand new four-track EP so titled as to signal the imminence of further such releases, would preserve this legacy…

…but that’s just getting a bit panicky. Let’s face it, EP-1 would have had to be pretty darn awful to annul all the accumulated kudos of old. And hey, “Bagboy” was pretty good.

Let’s listen to “Bagboy” again as a preparatory measure…

Not bad. Or, as we said at the time, “an imperious, mean-ass motherf***er of a tune with typically great/inscrutable Black Francis lyrics and a video featuring a bathtub full of Fruit Loops… On this evidence, a new album could be worth the wait after all”.

Having sat with EP-1, we’re no longer so sure about that last assertion. Most problematical is second track “Another Toe” which, as noted elsewhere, sounds like Green Album-era Weezer. That in itself is no particularly bad thing, but its meaty power-pop is adorned with a distinctly un-Pixies-like sheen.

Is it even Black Francis singing? It doesn’t sound like him, nor do the slightly ham-fisted lyrical likes of “Another drink, I start to sink / Another toe in the ocean”. If there’s a story behind this one, we could do with knowing it.

Graceful, shimmering opener “Andro Queen” is a more pleasant form of surprise, not that its marching rhythm underpins all that much more than some prettily spaced-out melody, while “Indie Cindy” and “What Goes Boom” each tack a relatively poppy chorus onto a spiky, mean-riffing verse.

Thing is, though, they both do it quite well, the former touched by the rabid speak-singing of “Bagboy” for lines like “You put the ‘cock’ in ‘cocktail’, man” (it would have sounded great on Surfa Rosa) and the latter switching from ‘muscular’ to ‘divine’ and back again as if it had walked straight off Trompe le Monde.

Here’s the video for “Indie Cindy”…

…see you all for EP-2. Though EP-1 is not without its merits, here’s hoping that Pixies blow it out of the water next time around.

There we go. A whole review without mentioning Kim Deal.

EP-1 is available from the official Pixies website.

Rocksucker says: Two and a Half Quails out of Five!

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About the Author

Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.


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