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Concert reviews Music

The Pixies at Massey Hall

Rating: NNNN


LA Skate punks Fidlar – with their fly-by set of a million moshable micro-songs about girls, drugs and misspent youth punctuated always with a falsettoed “thank you!” between songs – proved to be a good warm up for what quickly turned into a standing-up-in-the-seats love-in for 80s and early 90s alt rock heroes The Pixies.

The Pixies, who are touring a couple new EPs minus bassist Kim Deal (who left the band last year) delivered a career-spanning nearly two-hour long set that served as a reminder that the band’s sound cannot be pigeon-holed. The four-piece sashayed smoothly between acoustic/electric alt-pop, noisy rock, and psychedelic experimentation, with some spoken word thrown in on new song Indie Cindy as well.

Though Deal was absent, The Pixies were not without a bass player in their rhythm section: sticking with the tradition of a feminine presence in the band, touring bassist Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, Zwan) fit right in, and seemed super stoked to be playing the songs, old and new. She kept moving as she laid the grooves down, and the crowd did too. And when she sang back-up vocals it often served as encouragement for everyone else to sing along.

The overall effect of the show felt like a temporary suspension of time, with Here Comes Your Man and Where Is My Mind (which segued directly into Gouge Away) all sounding more of the present than strictly nostalgic and new songs like Bagboy and Magdalena almost passing as Pixies classics.

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