Revered bands re-forming for live dates is one thing. However, with a few honourable exceptions – the Go-Betweens, Sleater-Kinney , more recently the Futureheads – trying to recreate past glories in the recording studio is generally at best anticlimactic for all concerned. The road to hell is indeed paved with discarded copies of the Verve’s 2008 album, Forth.
Given how brightly they burned in the late 1980s, Pixies were always likely to struggle to live up to expectations when they decided to write new material, but Indie Cindy (2014) and Head Carrier (2016) were woeful by anybody’s standards.
Beneath the Eyrie is no better: once again, the songs are largely pedestrian, the lyrics too often ploddingly workaday (“I don’t mind the rain/ But I’m ready for love”), the erstwhile Black Francis no longer screaming and yelping like a man possessed. On Graveyard Hill at least opens with a bassline that’s a distant echo of Debaser’s but the song proves to be more “slicing up a nice loaf of bread” than “slicing up eyeballs”;the awkward bar-room lurch of This Is My Fate sounds oddly like Tom Waits, while the Nick Cave-like Bird of Prey starts off with a rare arresting lyric (“I’ll set my broken bones with a twist and a crack”) but goes downhill from there. It’s not a terrible album – it’s better than many bands that Pixies inspired – but it isn’t terribly good either.
