Death to the Pixies

Art by Kii Arens and
Ron Walotsky

The Pixies were a life-changing band for me. I remember the exact record store and the exact bin in that store where I pulled out Trompe le Monde, their fourth album but my first of theirs. I remember not taking the disc out of my CD player for months, and feeling devastated when I heard the band had officially broken up not even a year after I fell in love with them. For many people who attended high school in the early-mid 90s, their defining moment in pop music was the suicide of Kurt Cobain, but for me it was definitely the dissolution of the Pixies.

This band combined so many things I loved, like surf music, punk rock, dreamy melodies, and off-kilter lyrics about things like UFOs, sea monkeys, and obscure surrealist films. After a ten year hiatus, the band reunited in 2003 and has toured fairly regularly since then with only one of the original members exiting. They have released three new albums since reuniting, including one just last year! 

Beneath the Eyrie was recorded in a studio in upstate New York that was once a church in the 1800s. The location inspired Pixies frontman and songwriter Black Francis to "intermingle with the spirit world, with life and death and with the mystical and a more surreal landscape." That inclination definitely shows in today's song, "On Graveyard Hill." It's a rocking tune about getting bewitched by a woman who gains supernatural powers from a special witchy flower. As gothically wonderful as that sounds, the video is perhaps even better. It's a neon-drenched mashup of silent horror film imagery, Italian giallo stylishness, and Black Francis's head inside a Madame Leota-esque crystal ball. For a band that once hated making music videos so much that they eventually boycotted them, they have really outdone themselves! Treat yourself below to a feast for the eyes and the ears.