Hey - Live Pixies

We Say...

Review by Yancey Strickler

Exclusively on eMusic, this two-disc compilation culls together two years of performances from the Pixies' reunion tour, covering every era of the essential band's career. The hits, especially an amazing performance of "Debaser," are impressive: "Monkey Gone to Heaven" record-perfect, the chopped and screwed version of "Wave of Mutilation" haunting, "Holiday Song" bouncy and propulsive, "Here Comes Your Man" done acoustic with a careless jangle and "Gigantic," arguably the band's finest moment, a stirring culmination of the whole Kim-bang.

And even with these many standouts, it's the title track that's the show stopper. Doolittle's "Hey" was always the starkest of Pixies tracks (in some ways, you could argue that Spoon sprung from its sparse loins), and in a live setting, with each instrument given space to breathe, the song becomes both haunting and invigorating: Joey Santiago's Velvet-y guitar solo a tease for Frank Black's exclamation-point "UH" barks, themselves table-setters for perhaps the defining Pixies lyric, "But baby aren't you tired of this?/ UH!"

This album, simply put, is 28 tracks of greatness, of live rock & roll done right. There's no reason not to download it, especially considering that this two-disc set will never exist in physical form. For Pixies fans, it couldn't get any better.

Of interest to, uh, eMusic historians: the self-titled Frank Black and the Catholics album was the first title ever posted on eMusic (way back in 1998), and was arguably the first album ever made legally available for commercial download. In a nice bit of denouement, "Hey" — Live Pixies contains the 1,000,000th song ever posted on eMusic: "Here Comes Your Man."