Pixies - Indie Cindy

When the Pixies reformed in 2004, they kick-started a trend you could call the Indie Reunion Olympics: approximately once every four years, a ‘90s alt.rock behemoth would get back together. My Bloody Valentine did it in 2008. The Stone Roses followed in 2012. Seeing that pigs have flown and Kate Bush is actually playing live later this year, I’m sticking a tentative fiver on The Smiths for 2016 (realistically, of course, it’s far more likely to be Oasis after Noel gets his second outing out of the way in 2015. But we can dream).

Black Francis and his fellow Pixies face the dilemma that haunts any band that decides to patch up their differences and head out for a lucrative lap of honour. Do you risk public ridicule by releasing new material? Or lazily retreat into the comfort zone of nostalgia? Banging out your anthems to a middle-aged fan base for all eternity is surely some artists’ concept of hell. Morrissey, for instance, doesn’t seem to be in any rush to get involved in any of that. Apologies, I digress...

Pixies also have a dramatic change of personnel to contend with, which wasn’t an issue for the Roses or the Valentines. Bassist Kim Deal departed last year and the group have replaced her with a rotating cast of stand-ins. Their inaugural EP 1 was greeted by a mixture of reserved praise and inexplicable scorn. To be fair, I was a little underwhelmed by the set of songs that followed on EP 2, but EP 3, which completes this comeback album, is far better.

Let’s cut to the chase: Indie Cindy is well sequenced and hangs together in a way that makes sense. If it were by any other band, we might be hailing it as a major album. The only trouble is that, compared to stone cold classic Pixies albums like Doolittle and Surfer Rosa, it doesn’t hold up anything like as well.

Things start impressively with ‘What Goes Boom’, a song that nails all the essential ingredients of a great Pixies song: noise, melody, brevity. New single ‘Greens and Blues’ sounded below average on an initial encounter, but it grows. Elsewhere title tune ‘Indie Cindy’ sees Black Francis wrestle with an existential dilemma: to wit, will his band be (as) revered and adored in its post-Deal incarnation?

‘Bagboy’ still sounds colossal and remains their finest comeback tune to date. Indie Cindy loses a lot of its momentum about half way in, with the middling ‘Magdalena 318’ and ‘Silver Snail’. Next up, the AC/DC-esque blast of ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ puts it back on course. However, if one is to be firm but fair, probably only ‘Bagboy’ is good enough to have merited a place on one of the Pixies’ top albums.

In short, Indie Cindy is not the triumphant comeback for which we had hoped – but neither is it the embarrassing shambles some might have feared. Enough, you might say, to keep going on with...