At last, the Pixies are in the news and it’s not related to their bassist! They are releasing a new EP (‘EP-2’) with four brand new songs that you can buy here, as a download or a 10-inch vinyl record, with or without the hoodie. At the same time, they have made available the first song, ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ available on YouTube with a complementary video.
The video is very strange, an amalgam of collage and graffiti-ed photographs with lots of faces, brains, eyes, skulls, anatomic figures, flowers and flies melting into each other, a bit disturbing, a bit old-fashioned demonic-nightmarish, if you want my take, but the song is not bad at all, and this is good news for people who were disappointed by their last release, EP-1. Yeah, I wasn’t fan of that ‘Bagboy’ song.
The song starts a bit like ‘Should I stay or should I go’ for a few seconds, then it goes all grungy distorted, and are these cowbells I can hear in the back ground? The music is weird enough, catchy, trashy, dirty, aggressive and over everything, Black Francis can still shout very well. Plus, with lyrics such as ‘I went to make the vivisection/Saw the star carved on the chest’ or ‘Scalpel’s going down to her navel/I felt her burning in my soul to pieces’, the song couldn’t feel more sexy-dangerous. ‘It’s a tale from the northwestern part of the UK, and it’s a witch-woman kind of a song,’ said Francis in a statement, ‘That’s what a ‘hexe’ is, and ours is a blue-eyed hexe. Guitarist Joey Santiago added, ‘Gil wanted a swagger, he wanted the guitar solo to sound like you’re going to have sex with this blue-eyed hexe.’
The new songs were recorded late 2012 at Rockfield Studios in Wales, and were produced by Gil Norton. I haven’t listened to the rest of the EP, but Francis has compared the third track ‘Greens and Blues’ to a great Pixies’ classic: ‘It was my attempt to come up with another song that would – musically, emotionally and psychologically – sit in the same place that ‘Gigantic’ has sat. Not that I could ever replace that song: you write songs and they come out the way they come out. So perhaps it can be said that this song fills the emotional niche that ‘Gigantic’ occupied, another show-closer. I think the lyric alludes to that, the fact that it’s the end of the night, the end of something. And a separation if you will, between the band and the audience. So I guess it’s kind of a goodbye song, or really more of a ‘good night’ song.’ So should we expect the best?
Tracklisting:
Blue Eyed Hexe
Magdalena
Greens and Blues
Snakes