It’s a been a long and often bizarre journey from the crunchy power pop of “Buddy Holly” to the perplexing, Twitter-prompted take on Toto’s “Africa”—but after 25 years of flying their dork flags high, Weezer is still belting out gooey vocal harmonies over cranked guitars. What’s more, this summer Rivers Cuomo and his pals are playing alongside their cooler big brother band, the Pixies, led by the redoubtable Black Francis, who has not a whisper of dork in his DNA. I mean, can you imagine a Pixies cover of “Africa”?

Weezer & Pixies
Tue, 7:30pm, $20+
Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View

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.

“I was at a record store in Boston, and I saw a person returning Come on Pilgrim,” says Joey Santiago, guitarist for legendary indie band the Pixies, recollecting their debut EP, on 4AD records. Back in 1986, the British label was known for its roster of ethereal gothic bands, and here was one seriously unhappy fan.

“Cocteau Twins was the sound…and then we came along and it was a jolting difference,” Santiago says.

He pauses to laugh at the lost sale. “I actually took it as a compliment.”

Santiago’s anecdote encapsulates the good news/bad news saga of the band. The Pixies didn’t just shake up a label; they sent tremors through the alternative music scene. Their jagged sound, shouty vocals and surreal yet salty lyrics inspired Radiohead and Nirvana and even made a fan of David Bowie, who called the Pixies the greatest band of the ’80s next to Sonic Youth.

Yet for all their cool bona fides, none of the Pixies’ four albums (Surfer Rosa, 1988; Doolittle, 1989; Bossa Nova, 1990; Trompe le Monde, 1991) charted anywhere near the U.S. top 40, and their five top-10 modern rock singles include no number ones.

A series of highly successful reunion tours beginning in 2004 helped redress this injustice and secured their place in the pantheon of rock gods. But the Pixies haven’t escaped their crossed stars: In a surprise move last September, the band released their first new music in over 20 years—the aptly titled EP 1—backed by a new tour. But the news was overshadowed by the announcement that bassist Kim Deal had abruptly quit in the midst of recording.

Following the January release of EP 2, I spoke separately with Santiago and drummer David Lovering (who’s also a professional magician) about the decision to get back into the studio.

When I suggest that a 20-year recording hiatus might imply concerns about living up to their own legend, Lovering blames protracted touring for making the decision seem more agonizing that it really was.

“When we got back together in 2004, that was going to be a yearlong tour—but it kept going. And going, and going,” he says. “In 2007, we came up with the Doolittle Tour. It was going to be one year; that turned into two years. … We had talked about doing new material. But it wasn’t clear if it was just talk. … But when Dolittle was done, we felt touring was a little incomplete without new material.”

Santiago shrugs off the question. “After a while, we just said, it’s time to entertain ourselves. And that’s my goal in the studio. … It’s a lot of work—but it’s time for us to be selfish, and just work and entertain ourselves.”

No looking back? “We don’t do sequels. We’re not milking it.”

Although Deal has expressed ambivalence about adding to the Pixies’ canon, she isn’t talking publicly about her reasons for leaving. And the band has respected her privacy. When I ask, Lovering responds, “I can’t say for sure all the reasons she left. I think that even before that, she would have been done with the Pixies. We wish her well, and we’re just trying to forge on ahead, with version 2.0.”

But Pixies 2.0 quickly ran into Kim-gate 2.0, when Deal’s touring replacement, Kim Shattuck, was replaced in November by Paz Lenchantin. Rumors circulated on social media about broken promises and passive aggression from the band—claims the Pixies deny, adding that no permanent decision has been made yet.

One unalloyed success, however, has been the band’s move to total independence. Skirting the labels, they’re releasing their music on the Pixies’ website as downloads and special-edition vinyl. With no advance promotion, the vinyl edition of EP 1 sold out in a single day. EP 2 dropped the same way, guerrilla style with no prelaunch hype.

“Exactly, it’s guerrilla release,” Santiago says. “Think of it as our next joke. We like to play jokes.”

Then he has a new thought, “Hey, young bands do it all the time. When we came out with our first release, we didn’t know people. Who the fuck are the Pixies? So, you know in a way, we kinda went back to what it was.”

So it’s a new start for the Pixies. Can we expect a full album?

Says Lovering, “There may be something like a record in the future. As a magician, I cannot reveal all of the surprises.”

Santiago’s response is more familiar to us non-magicians: “We don’t know. We have no idea. We just go from day to day.”

The Pixies perform at City National Civic on Feb. 22. More info.

Seminal alt-rock group the Pixies recently announced a rare Silicon Valley tour stop arriving this February.

The band plays San Jose Civic on February 22 with openers  indie pop duo Best Coast as part of an extended leg of their most recent world tour.

The Pixies, in their heyday of the late 80s/early 90s, were one of the most influential bands to shape alt-rock and indie rock. Pitchfork ranked the Pixies second album Doolittle as the fourth best album of the 80s, and their third album Bossanova as the 28th best album of the 90s. Even Kurt Cobain revealed in a 1994 Rolling Stones interview that “Smells like teen spirit” was heavily influenced by the Pixies. He said, “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”

After an extended break the band reunited in 2004 with a headlining (behind Radiohead) slot at at Coachella, followed by several subsequent tours. They released the song “Bam Thwok” in 2004 and then “Ain’t that pretty at all” to the Warren Zevon tribute album, Enjoy Every Sandwich. Just recently in June of 2013, bassist Kim Deal quit the band and was replaced by the Muffs’ Kim Shattuck. Days later, the Pixies released their first single in almost a decade, “Bagboy”, followed by the four song release, EP1, their first official release since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde.

Tickets for the San Jose concert are $50 and go on sale tomorrow at 10am. More info.

Here is a new video Pixies just released for their song “Andro Queen,” from EP-1, released in September of 2013: