Pixies
10 out of 10 - Flawless.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Santa Barbara Bowl
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The fact of this matter is, there isn’t much I can say about the Pixies that probably haven’t been said already unless you are in life a pixie and living under a bridge somewhere out of touch with the rest of the world.
The last time I saw this band live was before the Internet and World Wide Web. It was a time when Bush Sr. was our president and Coachella was just a valley out by Palm Springs.
Cut to 2004 and the revival of said Pixies in what started out as a small club jaunt that made its way across the Northern reaches all the way to the Coachella festival and 65,000 strong back in April. It has been said many times over the Pixies had influenced the likes of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, two of the biggest alt-modern bands of the nineties and still holding influence in today’s sonic sound landscape. Well, the band forged on all year and ended a west coast leg on Sunday October 24th.
Armed with only their instruments, the band glided on stage at the Santa Barbara Bowl for what would become the best show I have seen in years. With all the acclaim, references, talk, hype, the band surpassed all expectations. I have seen a few bands that were big that have gotten back together and toured and they were all pretty pathetic. The Pixies were absolutely not! Joey, Kim, David and Frank were all that and more as they plowed through a back catalog of notables including the beautiful “gouge away”, “umass”, “debaser”, “velouira” and “monkey gone to heaven” to name a few.
Nothing was really said between songs and the lulls were few if any. One after another the band lightly tore into the repertoire of twenty-eight songs! When is the last time you saw a band play that many songs? The highlights of the night were when the band finished it’s set and supposed to leave the stage and come back for an encore. The band took to the front of the stage, waving to fans, soaking up the praise for the 3,000 in attendance. Back and forth they went across the stage, smiling, enjoying every second of it and a giddy Kim Deal then adorned her bass and took us into the last two of the night, lending her beautiful pixie-esque vocals to “gigantic”, the sweetest ending to the sweetest show.
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