Pixies get their spark back on ‘Oyster Beds’
Pixies morph into Sex Pistols on their latest track, ‘Oyster Beds’. From start to finish, it’s a roaring contemplation that turns the simplest inspiration of a painting into the artistic centre of their most hi-octane track in a while. As an ode to dust the cobwebs off and getting back to the spark, it’s gloriously representative of the band that made it.
The story starts with the band at Rockfield Studios. Ten albums and however many decades into being a band, it must be tough to keep the creativity flowing. For their vocalist, Black Francis especially, there have been periods of total burnout where hobbies and habits have dropped off. While music has remained a constant throughout his life, other channels of creativity have come and gone and ended up getting lost amidst the ever-rolling process of actually living and working as an artist.
One of those was painting. It had been a casual interest of his, and then, one day, it stopped. But while the band were back at the studio working on their upcoming album, The Night the Zombies Came, suddenly the spark came back. “I took up painting again when we were recording at Rockfield, and I didn’t stop,” he said.
That sense of the dust being blown off old passion is heard loud and clear on the track. It’s a loud one and the loudest one that’s been heard from the band in a while. In that way, it’s a return to the very earliest days in a band’s history when they’re just a gaggle of musicians making noise somewhere.
It’s the sort of raging piece that would come pounding out of a garage in some American movie, where the bratty older sister would go and tell her rocking younger brother to shut up. It feels like a Sex Pistols track in the way that there’s the energy of the DIY, passion over skill approach that the punk group had.
The song shows Francis picking up the paintbrush again and getting back to his love for making things. That concept could be extended to cover the entire new album. “It’s not like I wrote a bunch of songs about zombies or that we tried to make the album sound scary or anything like that,” Francis told Rolling Stone, “’Zombie’ is just an associative word. You can do with it what you like.” But maybe the Zombies in question are a kind of metaphorical stand-in for stagnation, with ‘Oyster Beds’, along with the earlier upbeat teaser track ‘You’re so Impatient’, being a weapon against it.
With the whole album landing on 25th October, there’s still a while to see if they fight the undead off. But on this new track, they prove clearer than ever that the band are still alive and kicking.
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