Album: Pixies - 'The Night the Zombies Came'
Black Francis’ necromancy awakens more than the dead in this attempt at resurrection on Pixies’ new album ‘The Night the Zombies Came’.
Resurrection is a practice often simplified, an act where one might liken it to a late awakening or an unrefined return to consciousness. For many bands, this practice of resurrection might be hampered by an inability to evolve sonically or lyrically, or perhaps the error of evolving without much thought. The opening track ‘Primrose,’ of The Night The Zombies Came is a hammering example of how resurrection can be more than simply rolling away a boulder, or the zombification of that what was once dead. To indulge in Black Francis and Emma Richardson’s haunting, enchanting vocals and the poetically, macabre lyrics, we can instantly identify a re-animated Pixies. Francis’ gothic narrative is well suited, to the tender mechanisations of starry guitar parts and dialled-down drumming. Yet beneath such a seemingly mellow ballad, the throbbing, pugnacious rancour of the bassline is awaiting to arise and shake things up on later tracks. From the earliest stages of listening, it is clear that the theme of emergence from a subterranean tomb is etched into each track. However, despite the Romeroesque title of the album, horror and fright are not the objectives of the album, instead, its instrumentation is anthemic, with the return of scratchy, dirge like rhythms and gristly lashings of Francis’ voice clawing its way through the density of energy.
Whilst the album struggles to ascend to the heights of near-perfect 80s albums such as Dolittle and Surfer Rosa, it is shaped from the self-same clay that characterised such earlier triumphs. On the track, Chicken, ropey, absurdist lyrics are ventured into anthemic proportions, with Francis’ first-person narration moored upon a vulnerable island of sadness that ricochets amongst the spectral backing-vocals and cutthroat guitar riffs. It is a desolate song, blemished with scarring isolation, reminiscent of Doolittle and it’s abrasive collage of strange voices and surf-charmed chaos. Later, the riot-act is declared through the orchestration ofOyster Beds, where the band escalates the urgency with rigour. On such a short-track, it is ambitious to punctuate the album with a grungy, gallop return to their past antics of undressing any preciousness. Sonically, the album does ferment, and allow itself to calm-down, with tracks like Mercy Me and Kings of the Prairie, that like the opening track Primrose, are opportunities for Francis to remind his listeners of his age. No longer is Francis the solipsist, flag-bearer of the youthful late 1980s, who mined out amongst the craggy landscape an identity for his band, an identity that roared with the ability to be loud and quiet simultaneously with bloodthirsty hunger. On this record, Francis protests with further poeticism, echoing an aged-Odysseus on The Vegas Suite, where reflection is wiry and thoughtful. That throbbing bass simmers beneath him, and like the opening track, burns away, at the cusp of dying down. The band have worked hard to burrow into the landscape of sound they have helped craft throughout their many active decades, yet for the first time, they appear to be augmented by their age.
At the tail-end of their time as musicians, the Pixies are taking time to re-animate themselves, not with idle intentions or the clichéd dressings of ‘old-rockers.’ Instead they are seeking out a return to their roots, with the added reverence only some bands are capable of hosting. The instrumentation at parts does dwindle into being repetitive, and in terms of variety, the direction of the music pales from being anything incredibly diverse. Pragmatically, production is refined and stripped down, a strong decision as it gifts the record a disassembled, organic charm. It is far from being a stratospheric album, or being shoulder-to-shoulder with Doolittle or Surfer Rosa, yet it is a record glossed over by a thematic décor that is more gothic than horror. The Night The Zombies Came, is an album belonging to a bayou graveyard, an album refusing to become a mere husk, an album dedicated to the yearning phantasmagoria of Hollywood drive-in-cinemas where pallid teenagers would shiver at the sight of anything remotely haunting or esoteric. Black Francis transforms throughout the album, signifying his intention of looking back and forth simultaneously, evidencing that like nocturnal arriving of the titular Zombies, some people (or things) are capable of transcending more than just one plane of existence.
Words by Josh Mabbutt
