A few thoughts on seeing The Pixies live

Because my buddy Todd is rad, I got to see The Pixies live at The Anthem in DC this weekend. It was genuinely one of the best shows I've ever been to. A few reflections in no particular order:

• They are incredible musicians. Our mental model of The Pixies is distortion-screamy-quiet-twangy but this team knows and loves their instruments and plays with precision and care. Dave Lovering could not have been deeper in the pocket and Joey Santiago played with a depth and complexity that was still shocking even on songs where I could sing every chord. New(ish) bassist Emma Richardson is absolutely sick — more on her later.

• They are LOUD AS FUCK. Something about the way they produce their records kind of hides or flattens this. Maybe it’s just not mechanically possible to record how loud they actually play and still have it be recognizable as music? In person they are face-meltingly loud. Not just in decibels, but in the density of sound coming at you per second. It’s almost like a Wall of Sound effect. If music emitted heat instead of sound, the audience would have been microwaved. I’ve seen "harder" or technically louder bands live, but I’ve never felt as physically dissolved by sound waves at a concert as I did on Saturday.

• Seeing them live really brought home to me why they were so many people's gateway drug into alternative/indie/post-pop/choose-your-label. Their music is rich with ideas, but that richness comes as much from their inputs as their outputs: In a ~90 minute show we heard surf rock, doo-wop, jangly pop, punk, R&B, ballads. Of all the bands of their generation, I think what The Pixies uniquely figured out was how to reject the synths and formalism and artifice that was polluting popular music but not throw away the pop formulas and popular styles that came before it.
  
  iTunes tells me they are "alternative" but I spent the concert time happily bopping and losing my shit like a 16-year-old at a Beatles concert. A fan of The Archies could get down with Here Comes Your Man. If you like Emerson, Lake & Palmer you’ll love Motorroller. Hey is basically an R&B/funk single. Mr. Grieves has traces of Hank Williams crackling over the radio, and Chicken is almost a Chi-Lites song. They were (and are) deeply inventive, but what they invented were ways to revivify the sounds they grew up loving, just with weird structures and chord changes and time signatures (I think Vamos is in 6/4?) and like 25% faster and 75% weirder, but their tone is easy to listen to. This really comes through live: The guitars sound like guitars, the bass sounds like bass, the drums sure as shit sound like drums. They inspired the Nirvanas and Radioheads and for sure did some weird shit themselves–but the sound of Pixies music is deeply recognizable as human people playing instruments.
  
  At a time when the 80s were still trying to choke the world with hairspray and styrofoam, the Pixies showed up with a beach umbrella and a picnic basket full of sandwiches, if sandwiches were for some reason made out of methamphetamines. Hearing them live, you really understand why they’re one of those "everyone who heard their album started a band" bands — they were probably the first and definitely the best of their generation to achieve Hegelian synthesis of what had come before.

• Pixies songs are compact. Their lyrics are dark and weird but also funny and not ponderous or discursive. (Gouge Away, a retelling of Samson's betrayal by Delilah and ultimate death at the hands of the Philistines, is 105 words long.) At the concert on Saturday, without stopping between songs, they covered 25 songs in about 90 minutes. Out of curiosity I looked it up afterwards: From Come on Pilgrim to Trompe Le Monde there are four (4) songs over four minutes. Sonic Youth’s Goo has seven. But it's not just brevity–the shape of Pixies songs are surgical and sudden, and you feel it live: Nothing is dragging, ever, even on the slow songs. So that probably didn’t hurt them in terms of getting some mainstream popularity.

• Emma Richardson. Jesus christ she's so good. Her playing was bouncy and locked in and her vocals were gorgeous. They ended with Into the White, and she brought the house down. A little part of me was prepared to miss Kim Deal, but that...did not happen. (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll go put on Last Splash.)

• One of the coolest moments of the night: Kurt Vile opened (and was phenomenal). About halfway into the Pixies set, he wanders into our section and grabs a table next to us and acts...like a fan. Taking photos, doing the guitar fingerings for his favorite songs. Even your idols have idols.

• Singing the "ooo ooo" part of Where Is My Mind with 5,000 strangers was genuine magic.