Particularly fond of Halloween this year, Black Francis and the gang? We’ll be scaring ourselves with the undead rather than ghosts, so… A few days before October 31, Pixies released their tenth career album, The Night The Zombies Came – their fifth in ten years.
Let’s not beat about the bush: the record is pretty average. Listenable, sympathetic at times, but, unsurprisingly, the product is agreed and Black Francis doesn’t even come close to its former level of composition. Primrose opens the album in a calm acoustic-guitar way, and makes us understand once and for all that the Pixies, in 2024, all on the border of their sixties, are not inventing a twentysomething snarl.
In 2024, Pixies prefer absurd quietude to surreal agitation. Even in the tracks closest to the punk spectrum that once characterized them (Oyster Beds, Ernest Evans), the mix and Black Francis’s voice rely more on a sense of restraint, far from an electric composition like Crackity Jones. And you know what? It’s just as well, and a wise choice. Black Francis’s gravelly voice is all the more appropriate on a slow song like Mercy Me, a surf composition at the end of the album that hints at Joey Santiago’s most inspired contributions.
If the album can be listened to in one go, with bits of lyrics or a few musical flights of fancy that make you smile, it’s hard to remember the names of the songs after the forty or so minutes that separate the first note of Primrose and the last of The Vegas Suite. Only one piece of the puzzle seems to stand out from the rest: Jane (The Night the Zombies Came), with its air of the unpredictable beau-bizarre we loved so much about them. But that’s not enough. The urge to listen to Doolittle or Bossanova for the thousandth time takes precedence over the immediate desire to dive back into The Night The Zombies Came.
You can criticize the content of the new Pixies, but the process behind it is bona fide. The Boston band makes music clearly more for the fun of it than with any real thought of creating something revolutionary. It’s not so easy to spit on a group of legendary musicians who simply want to stay in shape, as evidenced by the announcement of a second major North American tour in two years that Pixies will be embarking on in a few months’ time (the American band will be in Montreal, at MTelus, for two nights in July 2025).
And for a very young fan of the band like your faithful scribe typing these lines, it will always be a pleasure to say to yourself: “I too was there, on a Friday at midnight, to get a new Pixies in my ears. Today, I too have the chance to go and see them live.”
Even if we’re a long way from Surfer Rosa and all that.
You’ve got to be happy with what you’ve got.
