Music review: Pixies, O2 Academy, Glasgow

THERE is a casual brilliance to Pixies, one of the great trailblazing bands of their time, whose influence can still be discerned on the latest wave of indie noise prospects shaking up a relatively moribund scene.

PIxies Black Francis, put in a no-nonsense performance: Picture: RMV/Shutterstock

Pixies, O2 Academy, Glasgow ****

Unlike their feral progeny, the Bostonian veterans channel all their energy through the music. This was a no-nonsense performance with minimal interaction and zero showmanship, just raw sonic power deployed with slick momentum and a simple but effective wall of backlighting.

The four-piece sprinted through close to 40 songs in two hours, so there was little time for hanging about, tuning guitars, cheeky banter or any of that superfluous stagecraft.

Pixies stand and fall on their setlist, which changes every night. In Glasgow, they front-loaded proceedings with a number of their best loved off kilter classics – the crazed desert punk fable Nimrod’s Son, suitably disorientated Where Is My Mind? and blithe indie pop uplift of Here Comes Your Man set an audacious standard which they could not hope to match with the material off their new album, Beneath The Eyrie, which was generously showcased across their set.

The mellifluous Ready for Love and pop gothic On Graveyard Hill are good songs but they are not anthems of the calibre of ebullient garage rocker Wave of Mutilation or indie disco standard Debaser which they used to recharge the dynamic along with unexpected gems such as their gonzo power pop rendition of Neil Young’s Winterlong, which could easily have been culled from their own eccentric catalogue.

FIONA SHEPHERD