For "official" coverage, this from the
NY Times today:
May 3, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Pixie Worship at a Hipster Gathering
By JON PARELES
NDIO, Calif., May 2 â?? Pity the bands that shared their Saturday-evening time slot with the reunited Pixies at the fifth annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival here. It seemed that the Pixies were the only band that everyone wanted to see among the 45 rock bands, hip-hop groups and D.J.'s on the festival's four stages on Saturday.
Radiohead, the million-selling band that was the festival's nominal headliner for the festival's first day, drew its own packed crowd when it followed the Pixies on the festival's main stage and played a magnificently baleful set. But even Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer, was thrilled by the Pixies reunion. "When I was in school, the Pixies and R.E.M. changed my life," he said during Radiohead's encores. A long-running band that has been dormant lately, the Cure, was Sunday's headliner; the festival's 50,000 tickets were sold out for both days.
Coachella has earned its reputation as the hipster's rock festival. Its lineup brings together the pride of college radio: a few million-sellers along with dozens of acts that have, or deserve, dedicated cult followings. It embraces Latin alternative rock and underground hip-hop along with rock; it also had far more female performers than most rock festivals manage to book.
Saturday's program included a greatest-hits set from the pioneering and famously impassive German synthesizer band Kraftwerk (which has quietly updated oldies like "Autobahn" with newer beats and technology); gorgeous reveries from the Argentine songwriter Juana Molina and from Savath & Savalas; earnest, surging, self-help rock from the Texas band Sparta, including a song denouncing President Bush and "illegal war" in Iraq; tightly wound confessionals from Death Cab for Cutie; clever braggadocio from the Hieroglyphics hip-hop alliance; and punk-funk revivalism from the Rapture, Moving Units and Erase Errata.
But the day belonged to the Pixies. In an hourlong set that charged through nearly two dozen songs, they were anything but a nostalgia act. Once again they were taking on death and love, derangement and destiny. At Coachella, in songs that dated back more than a decade, the Pixies were simultaneously desolate and hilarious, savage and absurd, sardonic and wounded. Along the way they made most of the day's other music sound one-dimensional.
Backstage, the band's leader, Frank Black, who was born Charles Thompson and called himself Black Francis when he started the band, said the reunion was instigated when he joked about it and was taken seriously. Apparently he hadn't realized how many people had cherished the Pixies. Formed in 1986 and disbanded in 1992 after making five albums that were far more popular in Europe than in the United States, the Pixies taught alternative rock a trick that Nirvana would carry to a mass audience: follow a quiet verse with a loud chorus. But there was more to the Pixies than their dynamics. Frank Black latched on to familiar styles â?? surf-rock, folk-rock, garage-rock, punk, metal â?? and then knocked their structures thoroughly askew, abetted by the band.
The members of the Pixies are balder and portlier than they were a decade ago, and they had little stagecraft beyond a winged P on David Lovering's bass drum. It didn't matter a bit. Onstage, as on the Pixies' albums, Joey Santiago's lead guitar traded heroics for hysteria, with wriggling, sliding notes or cheeky dissonances, Kim Deal's bass tugged at the songs from below, and Mr. Lovering's drumming could be full and brawny or suddenly drop away, leaving skeletal bits of cymbal. Pixies' songs can't be done by rote. They need Frank Black to get all worked up: whooping, cackling, snarling and sometimes yearning with true affection. The gleeful noise never hid a troubled soul. The reunion will continue; the Pixies are booked for New York at the Lollapalooza Festival on Aug. 17 at Randalls Island.
The Pixies had their first life before alternative rock was thoroughly commodified and bands decided they had to stick to one attitude. Somehow many rock bands lost faith that their audiences could handle mixed messages. Recently hip-hop has been more likely to mingle manifestoes, humor and come-ons, though lately underground hip-hop has started to develop its own inevitable formulas.
A few bands on Saturday were willing to scramble things. The Desert Sessions, a dozen musicians convened by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, knocked around blues and punk, jokes and love songs; Kinky, from Mexico, did border-hopping dance-music hybrids; and there was a fierce, grandly cantankerous set from . . . and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. The Pixies reunion doesn't need to spawn imitators, but maybe it will remind rockers of the joys of inconsistency.
