The Night the Zombies Came proves to be a modest Pixies party

With the amount of times listeners pray for a turnaround, get spoon-fed a half-decent group of singles that seem to foreshadow the second coming of Doolittle, and inevitably get let down like they were waiting for their absentee Dad who really promised to be at Christmas this year, no really, Pixies are close to being the musical Frank Gallagher. It’s starting to be our fault.

In the case of The Night the Zombies Came, Black Francis seems to clock-in moments before each recording starts, clocking-out with a relieved exhale as each track hits the final concert-focused “BUM” as it closes. Concert-focused is the ideal descriptor anyone could level at the record; its best-case-scenario is keeping bodies moving in between renditions of “Where is My Mind” and “Hey” at Glastonbury. This is accomplished with the utmost effort required to make filler engaging. Take notes: have your bar be in Hell and stiff mediocrity is a reprieve. Pixies have been to worse places and committed more vile acts than doing one for the crowd.

A quick gloss through the tracklist can provide some rules and regulation for your journey: if a track is below three minutes, it’ll be a modest barnburner that fizzles too fast, and if it’s above that, then you’re in for Black Francis impersonating a middle school vocal recital. The worst offender, and best example, of this is the title track, which is an agonizing display of stiff melodies and simplistic progressions. While he’s drumming up as much fervor as one can while completely ambivalent to your craft on those propulsive tracks, his balladeering sounds like he’s trying to get a distant relative to clap from the back row of the school auditorium.

When the distortion is flowing like beer on V-E Day, The Night the Zombies Came proves to be a modest party record, beneath the fat. It refers to the ancient text of 70s Rock, playing loud and fast enough to get by on energy alone. The pockets where the Pixies can seem to put an drumbeat and an electric guitar in the same postcode are a layup for the once imaginative and noisy group. Having a career of their length means that if the instruments just happen to be in a room, you might expect them to start playing out of sheer instinct; whatever it is, it’s all that’s driving them at this median point of their career.

As a late deflection, and for the sake of the argument, let’s blame the last 30 years of Rock music instead. Like a modern remake of an old video game, Pixies’ music displays their role in shaping their industry, but the progress has already been made. What transitions in the medium were accomplished back then can only look and sound like normality now. This isn’t to say that putting The Night the Zombies Came in place of Doolittle would incur the same results, as Pixies were simply a greater sum back then. But when you shape the noise to come like they did, resting on your laurels in the years to follow will mean you just sound like every other four-piece with a festival gig. Don’t look now, but your future happened already.