David Bowie portrayed them as
“Psychotic Beatles”
: an American group formed in the 1980s, the Pixies released a new album,
Doggerel
, on Friday , followed by an ideal international tour to measure their massive contribution to alternative rock.
From the opening track,
Nomatterday
, we find their paw with the creeping bass, the changes of rhythm and the leader Black Francis chanting mockingly "
Don't waste your time on me
" (
"Don't waste your time with me"
) .
Their discography nevertheless deserves to devote a few time slots to it.
"The Pixies is a breaking point in the history of music in the 80s and 90s, an innovative group for sound and its disruptive song formats"
, summarizes for AFP Luc Broussy, director of the
Magic
musical review
.
Without the Pixies, Nirvana, Radiohead or Weezer wouldn't have sounded the same.
“I was so connected to this group, we used their dynamic: to be soft, calm and then heavy and hard”
, will even say Kurt Cobain.
The singer and guitarist of Nirvana will also recruit Steve Albini, producer at the helm of the album Pixies
Surfer Rosa
(1988) for
In Utero
de Nirvana (1993).
David Bowie also hailed the Pixies' art of juxtaposing
"calm verses"
and
"eruptive choruses"
, equally admiring Black Francis' cryptic lyrics and
Joey Santiago's guitar
"texture" .
And the Heroes
singer
lamented that they weren't prophets in their country:
"In America, they didn't set people on fire like they did in Europe."
The history of the Pixies is not easy.
So when their track
Where is my mind?
touches the general public, via the final sequence of the film
Fight Club
with Brad Pitt in 1999, the Boston group no longer exists, separated for six years.
An ego feud between Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal, all sprinkled with the traditional excesses of circus rock'n'roll, closed a fruitful first chapter.
It is then a heartbreak because as Luc Broussy reminds us.
"It was rare at the time to have a very prominent woman in a group, just look at U2, Simple Minds or The Cure, where there is not a woman",
he remarks .
.
The title
Gigantic
(
Surfer Rosa
album ), one of the most emblematic of their repertoire, is sung by Kim Deal alone, who co-signs the lyrics.
The only other notable group to shake rock in its certainties, with another strong woman in those years, also bassist and also named Kim (Gordon), is Sonic Youth.
Second youth
On forced vacation from the Pixies, Black Francis called himself Frank Black (his real extended name was Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV) and released albums solo or escorted by the group The Catholics.
But it was Kim Deal who landed a hit with
Cannonball
(1993) in the Breeders, a group with her twin Kelley.
The Pixies, from which Bowie took over
Cactus
or
Debaser
on stage , finally reformed for concerts in the mid-2000s, before Kim Deal definitively slammed the door in the 2010s. Since then, Paz Lenchantin, American-Argentine bassist, has participated in the second discographic youth of the group (she sings the track
All I think about now
in 2016).
“The difficulty for the Pixies is that when you hear a good title on their new albums,
like in
Head Carrier (2016),
you want to listen to the albums from the time when they were at the top like
Surfer Rosa or Trompe le monde
(1991)
”, emphasizes Luc Broussy.
It is also the pedagogical virtue of the release of
Doggerel
, driving force behind a tour to go back to the source of so many currents for the young rock audience, the one present massively at the Arctic Monkeys concert at the recent French festival of Rock en Seine by example.
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