Pixies Live in Athens

I just came back from the PIXIES concert in Rockwave Athens 2004. The band was great, everybody had a wonderful time and I remembered how much I like their music. As you may have noticed my BLOG nickname comes fron the title of one of their albums. I believe that Pixies' music is very powerful and sophisticated. It's like everybody on stage is playing a different tune, but together they sound like a wonderful multi-layered formula that needs to be decyphered. It is wonderful, powerful, mind-boggling and raw music with true feeling. I just love them.

Opening with "Bone Machine," and traversing a crowd-pleasing set list that was weighted toward material from their first three releases--the 1987 EP "Come On Pilgrim, the 1988 album "Surfer Rosa" and its 1989 follow-up "Bossanova"--the quartet sounded as if they'd never gone away.

Black's voice remains an incredible instrument, one that seems specifically designed for the loud-soft-loud dynamics that the Pixies perfected long before the style was appropriated by the likes of Nirvana and Radiohead. While he can hold a pitch-perfect note indefinitely--as he proved this night on "Caribou"--his steely vocal cords can still belt out the best scream in the business: he didn't hold back at all on "Debaser," and seemed no worse for the wear when switching gears to "Monkey Gone to Heaven."

If only they had played "Where is My mind?" Where was theirs?