But part of what made the Pixies interesting is that they always seemed to possess some unquantifiable danger, which they no longer do. Everyone else: Listen to "Indie Cindy" at your own risk. Kim Deal moved on to focus on the Breeders, a project with her identical twin Kelley whose albums sound like abstract slumber-party music for teenagers with comfortable access to weed. So he sees the boar, and in two short lines, the song is over. “Snakes,” “Blue Eyed Hexe,” et cetera: these are just distractions, breadsticks. The notion that they were changing the shape of alternative rock seemed like a nice bonus but immaterial. Francis went on to make several solo records as Frank Black, one of which is called Teenager of the Year and is the sound of a creative person relinquishing himself of the pressures of being in a famous band and appreciating the practice of not giving a damn. The lyric 'Indie Cindy' implies some kind of cheapness to the independent '80s sound Pixies helped to define. It may be the most vulnerable line Francis ever wrote. The project cost a thousand dollars, including printing, tapes, and beer. Probably not Pixies fans who used up their goodwill on Indie Cindy, but it’s not modern or catchy enough for any era of alt-radio. It’s no coincidence that Indie Cindy is at its best when Joey Santiago cuts loose with his guitar Read Review Instead, bass guitar duties on the album are handled by Simon "Dingo" Archer, a former member of the British post-punk band The Fall. The high school me who fell in love with the band's discography years ago probably would have disinterestedly went to bed early midway through the album if it was "Indie Cindy" I first heard instead of "Surfer Rosa." At least things couldn’t get any worse. Jayson Greene of Pitchfork Media castigated the extended play, arguing there is "no Pixies in this Pixies" and giving it a rare score of 1.0. They seem like a really pretty good alt-rock band, better than the vast majority of the competition Read Review. Released 28 April 2014 on Pixiesmusic (catalog no. PM006CDX; CD). Francis’ slithery, sexual energy of yore has given way to an old-man crotchetiness. Grieves,” “There Goes My Gun” and “Dead”—that the album becomes what it really is. They can handle this now, and they do. It won’t win back scorned fans who took the band’s fall from greatness as a personal betrayal, yet it comes closer to conjuring the gleeful chill of the Pixies’ classic albums than anything they’ve released since reuniting. More recently, they’ve released albums by Deerhunter and Ariel Pink, and in general remain a safe home for uncommon art. The sinister spark, the mischief, that giddy confusion they stirred with their blur of candy and sadism—it was totally absent, replaced by an at best anonymous, at worst obnoxious shrug of secondhand tics. She had actually been fired between Doolittle and Bossanova and subsequently rehired, and on later Pixies albums appears just often enough to reminds you that she’s in the band. Things start decent and peter out quick. 6.0 | FasterLouder. The Pixies have now been reunited for four years longer than they were around to begin with, but are just getting around to releasing a new album, which they have called Indie Cindy. Pixies are set to release Indie Cindy, their first studio album since 1991's Trompe Le Monde, on April 29 via Pixiesmusic.It comprises EP-1, EP … Toward the end of the song, Francis offers the line, “As we follow the bouncing the ball/They call this dance the washed-up crawl,” and then, a simple plea: “Indie Cindy, be in love with me.” Part of loving the Pixies has always been the suspicion that they were gracing us from an alien place somewhere beyond love, where sentiment was never easy or necessary. This is outlaw music, sharpened by conspiracy theory and too much time with too little human contact. Having new material to perform doesn’t hurt, either. Even the spritely jangle of “Bird of Prey” does little to temper the resentful bite of Francis’ lyrics. A kind of concept album emerges, especially toward the album’s end: a song about the geography of Mars followed by a song about a burnout named Jefrey—“with one f”—sitting on a carpet with a tabla, thinking about outer space, followed by Francis staring into the sun, a gesture made out of the desperation to find new answers. Pixies – ‘Beneath The Eyrie’ review Arguably their greatest work in 28 years, this otherworldly album filters present-day tribulations through the band's witchy, psychedelic prism 4 Then return to Trompe Le Monde and you can hear how angry Francis had become. Discover releases, reviews, credits, songs, and more about Pixies - Indie Cindy at Discogs. Francis liked the surrealist movies of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch circa Eraserhead, which use violence not as a real-world dynamic but a metaphor for the roiling inner worlds we can cover up but never quite control. She had never played the bass before but presumably saw in his ad some sly humor and the spark of liberated thinking that lies behind a bad idea. The blustery opener “Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain” and the naked “Ready for Love” cast him as heartbroken and cursed, picking up where his confessional final effort with the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, left off. Indie Cindy’s title track is built using the template of Bossanova: Spacey and gorgeous, shattered and dissonant, spacey and gorgeous again. Two of its best songs (“Caribou” and “Vamos”) ended up being re-recorded in more muscular forms; another (“Nimrod’s Son”) unfortunately wasn’t. The Pixies … Eight of these songs were released as Come on Pilgrim on 4AD, an English label that had built a reputation selling, moody, vague bands like Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins but by 1987 had also released some Bulgarian choral music, the number-one dance-pop song “Pump up the Volume,” and an album by their first American signing, the Throwing Muses. “The Long Rider,” meanwhile, is the album’s big earworm, and prime radio fodder on the off chance alternative stations decide a new Pixies single might be something they’re into. If you have to, just pretend it's the new project of Frank Black, Joey Santiago and David Loverling. The first time I played Indie Cindy, I tried to figure out why the Pixies chose to make a new album now, a decade after they reunited. The band is also learning how to make change work in their favor. It’s true what they say about the desert when they say it looks like the moon. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. There are moments where, if you zone out just a little bit, it feels like you’re listening to some Bossanova B-sides that you somehow missed. Three middle-aged guys seeing what happens when they get back on the horse and try again, they now sound most comfortable when they're being laid-back, “Greens and Blues” and the chorus of “Indie Cindy” especially. He still howls and screams, but had also developed a new voice, a flat, posthuman kind of monotone. Their songs feed back to surf, boogie, doo-wop and early R&B more easily than anything post-Beatles. Anybody who pays good money to see the Pixies in 2014 probably isn’t going to be yelling for Indie Cindy deep cuts. The romping “Graveyard Hill” (one of several tracks co-written by Lenchantin, an eager presence throughout the album) sets up Black Francis for some of the freest, most feral barks he’s unleashed in two decades. Worse than any of the music is the feeling that a band so deft at challenging the system has become part of it in the most predictable ways, rubbing together the tropes of their old art and hoping they can still start a fire, replacing experimentation with routine, filling Kim Deal’s place with not one but two different bassists over the last five months, breaking up the album into three EPs to gin up interest, and generally reminding us that artists of their stature are businesses, not charities. Indie Cindy collects songs from their recent three EPs and does contain tracks of merit. Complete your Pixies collection. ... unless your parties involve sitting around a MacBook reading Pitchfork. Early on, Francis—a comic-book kid raised in an evangelical church—talked about the band’s music with all the pretense of someone fixing toilets or laying shingle. Pixies – 'Indie Cindy' album review. Head Carrier is the sixth studio album by the American alternative rock band the Pixies, released on September 30, 2016 on Pixiesmusic and PIAS.Produced by Tom Dalgety, and recorded at RAK Studios in London, the album is the first to feature bass guitarist Paz Lenchantin, who joined the band in 2014 to tour in support of its previous album, Indie Cindy. After 11 years of separation, the Pixies reunited and went on tour, becoming one of a slew of ’80s and ’90s alternative bands lobbying for heritage status. They gave them 1-star (out of 10). EP1 received mixed reviews from music critics. At heart, the Pixies were a kind of American goth band, fascinated by rural violence, the intersection of lust and danger, creepy innkeepers and the sexual magnetism of strangers who wander into roadside cafés from parts unknown. Interested newcomers to the band: Listen to the Pixies chronologically. The reviewer, Jayson Greene, wasn’t born when the Pixies began making music. The album’s lows aren’t so much bad as routine. Complete discography, ratings, reviews and more. Pitchfork's 25 worst albums of 2014. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months. It at least offers the group a chance to mix it up a bit after years of bleeding the same old Doolittle staples dry. “You want to be different from other people, sure, so you throw in as many arbitrary things as possible,” he told the writer Simon Reynolds shortly after their 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa. Indie Cindy by Pixies album reviews & Metacritic score: The first full-length studio release for the alternative rock band since 1991's Trompe Le Monde was produced by Gil Norton. The lyric 'Indie Cindy' implies some kind of cheapness to the independent '80s sound Pixies helped to define. 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