For the record, I was pulling for them. For services rendered to indie music, for the bands they’ve inspired and for proving to me and countless others that rock still had life in it. The Pixies deserve to be rich and happy, left alone to play whenever and release whatever they want, on exactly their own terms.

But their Feb. 22 performance at San Jose’s City National Civic, part of the Pixies’ first tour supporting new music in more than 20 years and the first ever without bassist Kim Deal, showed that they don’t need my good wishes. From the opening tom-tom of “Bone Machine” to their final encore, almost two hours later, the Pixies proved that they are still a living, creative force. With emphasis on the “force.”

The crowd was older, fans with memories of the band’s initial 1986 to 1993 run—although there was some young blood too, including at least one pre-tween, brought by parents who themselves could have been children of any original Pixie.

But any thought that these hardcore supporters might resent new songs encroaching on the golden glow of their lost college years was just a critic’s natural skepticism. When the hardcore-structured “What Goes Boom,” from last fall’s EP 1, segued seamlessly into opening numbers from Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, there was a great pumping of fists and shouting of lyrics from the crowd. The message was clear: Real fans already have embraced the new stuff.

MORE: Photo gallery from the Pixies at City National Civic.

Black Francis’ signature holler was in fine full-throat. And touring bassist Paz Lenchantin, Kim Deal’s replacement, at least for the moment, shouted right back as they worked through songs from the entire Pixie’s catalog (plus one Jesus and Mary Chain cover). No frills, no banter. Just lots of loud rock.

Second concern scotched: There can be life, post Kim Deal.

Nevertheless, the atmospherics were distinctly different. Beside three middle-aged guys from Boston, the slightly Lenchantin can resemble a popsicle. Her willowy dancing and beaming smile are no less of a contrast, either, to the intensity of the founding members. While they were absorbed in the moment, Lenchantin was effusively enjoying it.

Self-proclaimed debasers, the Pixies are gleeful demystifiers, sapping the pretense out of love songs and rock stardom alike. This has given poignancy to Francis’s forays into sentimentality—when he admits to aspiring to something pure and redemptive, whose possibility is inevitably thwarted in the music. But in numbers where the “quiet” dominates in the Pixies’ trademark loud-quite-loud formula, yearning songs such as the recent “Indie Cindy,” Lenchantin brings something the Pixies have never had before: unabashed romanticism.

Deal’s magic was that she had the force to meet Francis’s bombast head on. She was his gadfly, whose goading and subverting inoculated the band against any symptom of testosterone rock. If Lenchantin stays on with the band, however, she could have a role voicing Francis’s naïve alter ego, which raises the question on some minds: Is the Pixies, minus Deal, just another name for the Black Francis Experience?

Because they don’t sing (much), Joey Santiago and David Lovering are sometimes seen in a second position, but they certainly are not there to to Francis’s bidding. Indeed, Santiago’s insane textures and deliberately wrong playing define the group’s sound as much as Francis’s shouting. (One of the evening’s highlights was Santiago’s inspired burlesque of Jimmy Page, a strutting, ridiculous, and seemingly endless feedback and effects solo in a giddy version of “Vamos.”) Meanwhile, Lovering’s muscular drumming provides a clarity and drive that keeps the songs from flying to pieces and his energy is inexhaustible. The words might be Francis’s, but the statement the Pixies make is a composite of four distinctive musicians following their own track.

In addition to questions answered and fears assuaged, there was genuine revelation that evening, in the form of an assaulting and transportive version of “Bagboy.” When the talk-heavy single was released last fall, it impressed me, not entirely favorably, as Francis riffing on Pere Ubu or Was (Not Was). But here was a wall of guitar noise and relentless drumming that was thrillingly vast and inhuman. It was the band’s least pop moment, when all their native prickliness, now domesticated by two decades of familiarity, came flooding back. If a new Pixies were forming today, this is what they would sound like. It was so fresh and defiant that it threatened to make the remainder of the show feel like an oldies act.

That fact that it didn’t is a tribute both to the strength of the original material and to the vitality of the band who, even after all these years, still has something to shout about.

Read more about the Pixies in our interview with Joey Santiago and David Lovering.

The first time I heard about Pink was when my 7th-grade choir teacher in suburban Doylestown, Pa., was freaking out about her former student, Alecia Moore, having a video on MTV. This was during the time of flash-in-the-pan boy bands like NSync and 98 Degrees, and flaxen-haired Tiger Beat staples like Mandy Moore and Brittany Spears. I figured Pink was more of the same.

Thirteen years later, she has proven to be one of the most consistent and entertaining pop stars of the last decade. Pink’s success includes three Grammys, several popular tours, and six studio albums that have sold 40 million copies worldwide.

PHOTOS: More photos from Pink’s concert at HP Pavilion

Through it all, she has been herself—a hard-working musician and performer who always maintains an edge but never causes tabloid-fodder drama. During her “The Truth About Love” tour stop at HP Pavilion on Monday night, it was clear why she was always meant for bigger things. Despite the fact that there were 13 large, image-rich screens and about 20 backup singers, dancers and band members all vying for the audience’s attention, you couldn’t take your eyes off Pink.

The show kicked off with a game show host/ringmaster plucking the singer out of the crowd as a Truth About Love Show contestant. After a couple minutes of a funny intro video, she emerged onstage in a leather-studded body suit and was lifted up into the air by three beefy dancers, swinging and twirling and bungee-jumping over the crowd.

She showed off her six-pack abs for most of the concert (after you see how much everyone sweats during the show, they are definitely hard-earned), as well as her pipes. You know you’re watching an amazing singer when she can belt out half a song while hanging upside-down with her legs entwined in ropes.

The concert’s acrobatics rivaled those of the Olympic gymnastics trials that were held in the same venue back in the summer. Both the singer and her multiple, sculpted dancers were often doing flips in harnesses 40 feet above the stage and crawling around in blinking cages as they flew through the air.

Judging by applause, most of the crowd members had been to her show before, and this time they came bearing gifts: screaming, pink-coiffed fans handed Pink stuffed animals and hand-made T-shirts throughout the performance, which she humbly accepted.

While she’s impressive on the radio or in videos, it’s hard to truly appreciate Pink until you’ve seen her live. The way she effortlessly busts out tear-jerking ballads, glides across the stage as she dances and banters with the crowd while genuinely appearing to have a good time is something you don’t see with just any Clive Davis-anointed singer.

View more photos of Pink at HP Pavilion.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there is no arguing that Radiohead is one of the biggest and most enduring bands of the last 20 years. Their tour landed at HP Pavilion last night to a sold-out crowd, and the band ripped through 23 songs spanning their entire career.

King of Limbs, their most recent album, was featured heavily, with nearly every song off the album played. The very electronic, highly percussive album with strange time signatures was far from a standard rock record, and when it came out over a year ago, the band said they weren’t sure how they would pull off some of the songs live. They added a sixth member, Portishead’s touring drummer Clive Deamer, to help.

Turns out the live versions of King of Limbs’ songs were better than the studio takes. The intricate percussion was done to great effect. In addition to the new record, the band featured songs off of every album except their first, Pablo Honey. They also played a previously unreleased song, “Identikit,” along with two songs making their first appearances on this tour: “I Might Be Wrong,” from 2001’s Amnesiac and “Planet Telex,” the opening track from their 1995 album The Bends. Both were highlights of the evening.

In stark contrast to their somber reputation, the band seemed to be in great spirits and truly enjoying what they were doing. Thom Yorke was in an unusually chatty mood; he joked with the crowd early on saying “Where am I?” The crowd’s response was lackluster at first, but after a few tries, they roared back “San Jose.” Yorke smiled and when he came back for the encore he screamed “Hello San Jose!” Throughout the night he riffed on politics, Silicon Valley, and even the rain. It was the most talkative I have seen the frontman in the 10 or so times I’ve seen them play.

The stage and light show was truly out of this world. The light wall, made of recycled plastic bottles, was mesmerizing and elegant. Going from subdued to all-out visual assualt to fit the mood of the songs, it was their grandest display yet of lighting and stage design.

Just before performing “Peso” late Friday evening at Avalon Nightclub, A$AP Rocky stood and watched as the packed room chanted his name as if it were their dying words—and he smiled, frozen, turning his back to gather himself and for perhaps the first time, to acknowledge the possibility that he is greater than even he knows.

“I always dreamed of this. I always wondered if you fucked with me out here,” he said, grinning and glassy-eyed. However vain and reckless Rocky claims to be, he can’t help but expose the conceit that he likes being liked. What’s weird is that he’s made, what, 12 songs? And they’re all fairly similar—at least in subject matter, production value and charm. So if ever there was a question about “why” the world has taken almost violently to the A$AP movement, this show would answer it.

Youth played a part. Youth always plays a part. The shelf life for most rappers is very short, and A$AP knows this better than anyone else—even Drake, who he would open for the following evening at the San Jose State Event Center. A$AP’s DJ played a few Biggie tracks, commemorating the 15th anniversary of the rapper’s death, and though the audience had eaten their “hip-hop vegetables”—a steady diet of Mobb Deep, Wu Tang, and Biggie Smalls—it dawned on me that most of Rocky’s fans at the all-ages show were barely in kindergarten when Biggie passed. They might vaguely know the lyrics to “Ready to Die,” but they definitely know every single Waka Flocka Flame song in existence.

Like any great hip-hop show, the evening felt a little riotous. Girls who’d probably spent all day getting gussied up for one chance to fall into Rocky’s purview were crammed against the stage. I overheard many of them complaining about very strange assaults—one woman said a man rested his chin on the nape of her neck, yelling “A-SAP!” directly into her ear. He was later escorted out.

Watching the audience was a little more fun than watching Rocky, himself mesmerized by the crowd—elbows-to-elbows, X’s on their palms, jeering a nasally and unconvincing opener, crying “Rocky! Rocky!,” making the most curious of requests. He had them eating out of his palm all night, and in return, they slipped ziplock bags of weed to him, whittled blunts, phone numbers.

And he seemed overjoyed to be there, and happier to be accepted. He only attempted the meekest of angry commentary. “I don’t wear diamonds,” which he deemed the property of “hippies.” Though very much a stylish lothario, quick to namecheck designers Rick Owens, Raf Simons, or embrace the eccentric schoolboy look of Brooks Brother’s Thom Browne, he looked more somber, head to toe in black. Still, he used his pedestal to scold some: “I fucks with Hypebeast, but fuck the posers that check that blog to get fly, n–ga!”

The evening’s best moments came when Rocky finally acknowledged the melting pot of influences that make up his body of work: Houston, New Orleans, Nashville and Cleveland. Using the instrumental for Three Six Mafia’s “Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp” to play against his own “Purple Swag,” the connection might have seemed more literal than stylistic. Realizing it quickly, he segued back into the original beat, and the crowd seemed thankful to be in the present instead of the past. When his DJ dropped Juvenile’s “Ha,” the Cash Money track featuring a teenaged Lil Wayne, Rocky just grinned some more, said “fuck it,” and dove into the crowd.

View more photos from the show.