Review Summary: The Queen is Dead, The Smiths are dead, and for better or for worse, the Pixies live.
There's a quote from a film that coincidently came out the same year as Pixies marquee album
Doolittle that fits this album extremely well. The quote is from the 1989 Stephen King adaptation "Pet Sematary," and reads as follows: "Sometimes, dead is better." Before Pixies were dead and in the ground they were an influential alternative rock band that abruptly broke up after releases four albums and one EP in a five year span. When a band dissolves after a short amount of time chock full of great material, the question "What could have been?" always arrises, but honestly, Pixies breaking up in 1993 was probably for the better. The Boston based band's final two albums
Bossanova and
Trompe le Monde while both great, were mere shadows of the landmark albums that came before them, and it was clear that the band was losing steam fast. Band leader Frank Black released two great solo albums after the death of Pixies, but that's about all he had in them, as the rest of his material is rather average. So with all that in mind, why did a band that could barely survive the 90s and that was completely absent in the 2000s decide to start recording new material in the 2010s? I have no clue, but all I know is that
EP1 isn't very good and makes me wish Pixies had stayed dead.
EP1 consists of four songs that range from average to bad and have no discernible qualities that link them together; they may have been written over a 15 year span for all I know. "Andro Queen" is passable but completely forgettable, "Another Toe" is awful, "Indie Cindy" has the band's signature surf rock guitar chords and a strong and beefy lead guitar riff, but its forced spoken word vocals and obnoxiously long run time ruin any potential it may have had. The closer "What Goes Boom" sounds like a band that doesn't know what they're doing, trying way too hard to be heavy, and it simply doesn't work. There's really no reason for this album to exist: it's uninspired, laughably short, lacks any sort of cohesion, and Kim Deal isn't even a part of it. It might as well be yet another average Frank Black solo record, but once you slap the Pixies name on it, certain expectations arise, and the quality of this record doesn't even come close to matching those expectations.
