Pixies – Beneath the Eyrie (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Seventh full-length album from the iconic alternative band. Sessions for the album took place at Dreamland Recordings near Woodstock, New York and unusually the band documented every minute of the process, which makes up a 12-part podcast.

“For me, music and performance are theatrical. Witches and ghosts were good enough for Shakespeare, so they’re good enough for me”. The artistic ethos of Frank Black, aka Black Francis and leader of the late Kurt Cobain’s favourite rock band Pixies for over thirty years, sheds some light on their new album. Beneath the Eyrie is the seventh studio album from the group and is a tribute to American gothic in all its dismal splendour; packed with references to Anglo-American folklore (St Nazaire, Daniel Boone, Silver Bullet) and surf and skate culture (Los Surfers Muertos, Long Rider). Pixies are on top form here with their signature bass riffs, Latino/surf sounds and acoustic guitars, especially in On Graveyard Hill, which is the showstopper of this legendary group’s comeback album. – Alexis Renaudat

For once-epic bands that restart their careers, recording new music is always fraught with peril, namely being trapped into an unwinnable comparison with their former selves. The Pixies’ first four albums remain utterly timeless, still gleaming with an otherworldliness unlike anything else before or since. Not surprisingly the band was unable to recapture that edge or atmosphere in either of their post-reformation albums, Indie Cindy (2014) or Head Carrier (2016). Pixies purists will argue that the problem with the new records was the reduced role of Kim Deal, whose fractious relationship with Black Francis was the band’s creative heart; the hair trigger tensions was what made the band so special before her final departure in 2013. Paz Lenchantin, who was a new addition for Head Carrier , has now settled in as a permanent contributing member, a change that may have inspired Francis to come up with the best collection of original tunes since 1991’s Trompe le Monde.

With its steady beat, single note guitar signature and opening lines “I set my broken bone/with a twist and a crack,” “Bird of Prey” has more than a whiff of earlier, more conventional songs like “Here Comes Your Man,” and is easily one of the album’s finest classic Pixies-like numbers. In tunes like “Los Surfers Muertos” and “St. Nazaire” where Francis shrieks the album’s best couplet, “Her daddy’s dead and her eyes are black/Smells like spliff and Armagnac,” Beneath the Eyrie is a conventional four piece rock record. It’s gothy, reminiscent of Nick Cave in spots and vividly obsessed with darkness via lyrics that revel in terms like “venom wine” and “poisonous forest” and Black Francis opining that he’s “succeeding as a failure” and yet is “ready for love.” Recorded with too much compression and a crushing drum sound, the band has nevertheless finally made a worthy new record, one that both gives them a future and honors their towering past. – Robert Baird

Tracklist:

1. Pixies – In the Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain (04:12)
2. Pixies – On Graveyard Hill (03:25)
3. Pixies – Catfish Kate (03:08)
4. Pixies – This Is My Fate (03:20)
5. Pixies – Ready for Love (02:33)
6. Pixies – Silver Bullet (03:44)
7. Pixies – Long Rider (03:32)
8. Pixies – Los Surfers Muertos (02:54)
9. Pixies – St. Nazaire (02:27)
10. Pixies – Bird of Prey (02:37)
11. Pixies – Daniel Boone (04:52)
12. Pixies – Death Horizon (02:05)