Pixies Play Sunfest

Pixies by Jay Blakesberg

If you’re the purest of Pixies fans, chances are your favorite music video from the Boston legends’ canon is “Velouria.” It featured a single 23-second shot of the band members frolicking down a rock quarry, only slowed down to a glacial pace. It was released in 1990, at the height of the video era, when hyperfast editing became synonymous with the form, but it was closer to the patience-testing art-house opiates of filmmakers ranging from Warhol to Godard to Tarkovsky. It’s hard to imagine a more sardonic middle finger to the popular music establishment than this hypnotic video—and it deliberately bore no connection to the track itself, one of the poppier tunes from Bossanova (albeit one that can still melt your face off in a live setting).

If this video made no sense commercially and only esoteric sense artistically, that’s part of what we’ve loved about the Pixies for more than a quarter-century. Their influences are cultish and subversive, their lyrics literary and opaque, their music dangling precariously on the precipice of danger while laughing at the possibility of plummeting into the abyss. Their best songs are still the the art-rock provocations fueled by clashing directions, the ones that would be dismissed out of hand on any television competition show and by all but the most adventurous label exec: “Debaser,” with its rollicking, dancy guitar riffs interrupted by Frank Black’s tortured, otherworldly wailing about a Luis Bunuel film from 1929; or “Where is My Mind?,” with its ritualistic campfire chants, its percussive skeleton of a song structure and its hauntingly surrealist lyrics, these disparate ingredients somehow creating one of the most enduring songs you’ve ever heard.

And then they disappeared, of course, for a good 11 years, and it took another 10 for the Pixies to finally unveil a fifth studio album, 2014’s Indie Cindy. Pitchfork notoriously seared the album with a 2.5 rating, an overly harsh reaction to this admittedly lukewarm and conventional effort. But I’d hesitate to call Indie Cindy a comeback album, because for Pixies fans, Frank, Kim, Joey and David never left our turntables or portable listening devices. That’s the great thing about music that still sounds fresh 30 years after it was released, long after loud-quiet-loud became a bankable formula and the Pixies’ innumerable imitators have ebbed and flowed on the alt-rock charts. The originals are still here, and still weird. The quartet will play SunFest (sans Kim Deal, sadly) at 2:15pm, May 3 in downtown West Palm Beach. Tickets run $32-$80 depending on the package. Call 561-659-5980 or visit sunfest.com.

~John Thomason