BLUE-EYED HEX-AH! DADADADADADADADA!!!! For the first time in ages – 22 years in fact – I find myself jumping around making a tit of myself to a brand new Pixies song. There are those who seem to want Black Francis & co to stick with the nostalgia gigs, rather than supposedly shit on their legacy with weaker new material – people like Pitchfork for example, who gave the admittedly less than stellar EP1 a 1/10 score. Then again, Pitchfork picked the risible Vampire Weekend as their album of the year, so maybe a 1/10 P4K score is no bad thing. So EP2 isn’t Doolittle or Surfer Rosa. But it’s nudging Bossanova and Trompe le Monde. It lurches, screams and swoons in all the right places. It has songs that lodge themselves in your head. It sounds like Pixies. “Blue Eyed Hexe”, built on a crunching Joey Santiago riff and an earworm of a chorus, explodes into a vintage Francis screamfest. “Magdalena” has that spooky sci-fi Bossanova vibe, and would’ve improved that album. “Greens & Blues” is Francis’ self-professed attempt at writing a set-closing anthem to rival “Gigantic”, and whilst it falls short – of course it does – it’s got the same epic, yearning quality to it as Trompe le Monde standouts “Motorway to Roswell” and “Letter to Memphis”. Final track “Snakes” is the only thing here that fails to deliver – it chugs out of the blocks like “Gouge Away”, but never explodes into the release of screaming and riffage its tension obviously demands and simply fizzles out. OK Black, you’ve sold me. Permission to release an album granted. [Rating:3.5]
