RECENT REVIEWS:

Various Artists
The End of Violence Soundtrack
Outpost Records
(10/17/97)

Steve Earle
El Corazón
E-squared/Warner Bros.
(10/16/97)

Joe Henderson
Porgy & Bess
Verve
(10/15/97)

Lee Feldman
Living it All Wrong
Pure/Mercury
(10/13/97)

Grant McLennan
In Your Bright Ray
Beggar's Banquet
(10/10/97)

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Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
True blue tributes
(09/19/97)

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Table Talk
Call it nostalgia or reverence or lack of imagination, are some cover songs better than the originals?

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Almost Heaven:
John Denver 1943-1997
Dawn Eden remembers the man whose music left no room for cynicism (10/14/97)

the P:I:X:I:E:S
+++++++++++++++++++++++"DEATH TO THE PIXIES"
(---- ELEKTRA ----)

BY GINA ARNOLD | Because they concentrate on hits culled from different eras, most Greatest Hits packages lack the artistic vision that more holistically conceived album projects are able to evince. The Pixies' new Greatest Hits package, "Death to the Pixies," is unusual in that that it has created one full-length CD that is as artistically complete as any of the Pixies' individual LPs. The Pixies broke up six years ago, but shards of their sound live on in millions of other bands. In the course of four swift years (1987-91), this Boston-based band released five fabulous LPs and, perhaps more significantly, never wrote a bad song. Thus, rather than concentrate on hits or chronology -- due to the wretched radio situation at the time, the Pixies never really had a hit anyway -- the song choice on the first disc of this two-record set is entirely dependent on flow: key changes, tempo, and the subsequent drama such effects, if carefully constructed, can evoke. Every song leads inevitably to the next, and despite the absence of certain killer tracks like "The Happening," "River Euphrates" and "Is She Weird," the songs that are included fit together so well that the LP is impossible to turn off. The only option, once it's on, is to turn it up.

"Death to the Pixies" (the name is taken from the band's T-shirt slogan) is full of innate greatness and sinister sonic charm as it wends its way from the end of the band's career ("Planet of Sound") to the beginning ("Nimrod's Son") and back to the middle (time is circular, after all). The songs flare up with little moments I'd forgotten -- "Here I Am/with my Hand," from "Holiday Song," and "You're so PRETTY when you're unfaithful to me" (from "Bone Machine"). But the original, startling uniqueness of the Pixies' music no longer stands out in stark relief as it once did, since so many -- from Nirvana to the Smashing Pumpkins to, in another context, the television show "The X-Files" -- took so much directly from them. The two-minute song "Tame," for example, encompasses every single aspect of P.J. Harvey's entire repertoire.

"Death to the Pixies" also belies the much-ballyhooed opinion that the Pixies were a bad live band. In fact, one of the greatest shows I ever saw was the Pixies at CA-Zelt, Vienna, Austria, on Sept. 4, 1990. I have the set list pinned to my wall next to my computer, so I can say with certainty that it contained 34 songs and three guitar-tuning changes; also that the band opened with "Cecilia Ann" and ended with "Tony's Theme," in between ripping across its music with no pauses or words until we, the audience, had risen up in an orgiastic mass of sonic bliss. The show that makes up the second disk of this album took place in Holland within three weeks of that show, at a time when this four-piece band was filled with fury, frustration and sheer unbridled talent; they were arrogant and underappreciated, and this was the peak moment of their brief career. So it's a brilliant move on their part to include the whole set, rather than snatching good performances from different shows like so many other live LPs do. That gesture, along with the seamless song choices of Disc 1, shows the intelligence and uncompromising integrity that always set the Pixies apart from and above their peers. It didn't do them much good at the time, but it's made them one of the more lasting acts of an all-too-underrated era.
SALON | Oct. 20, 1997