• Pixies – Beneath the Eyrie

    Complaints about Pixies’ latter-day output – that is, their two LPs of post-reunion material, 2014’s Indie Cindy and 2016’s Head Carrier – have been plentiful, and loud: it’s not the same without Kim Deal, whose gifts for odd yet propulsive rhythm and sense of unnerving harmony had contributed so much to their sound before she left the band in 2013; it recalls too often Black Francis AKA Charles Thompson’s solo work, lacking the demented energy that defined their early material; the biblical, literary, and cinematic references, once deployed wittily, now sound laboured or even self-parodic. The criticism hasn’t been entirely unfounded. The urgency that infused their…