Live at the Marquee moshers go to heaven

Pixies unleashed a glorious aural assault opening with their monster track ‘Debaser’ where David Lovering absolutely leathered into his drum-kit for some pounding rhythms to announce the arrival of the frantic foursome.

Black Francis — always a much cooler name than his solo moniker Frank Black — went straight into ‘U-Mass’ with a twistier, snarlier vocal and looked so comfortable in his own skin, so ineffably indie that he makes looking like Comic Book Guy the only way to go.

Francis roars, “Stupid stuff it makes us shout” and the Cork moshers could hardly put it better. Throwing huge hits out like juicy bones to snarling dogs, the crowd went absolutely nuts for the third track in, the ever-excellent ’Monkey Gone to Heaven’.

Highlights from the set were ’Hey!’ – which got even funkier guitar lines all the better to mess with our heads even more — ‘Bone Machine’ and an absolutely superb banging version of ’Mr Grieves’. These numbers were cast-iron reminders that it was Pixies practically created the blueprint for the quiet-loud- quiet-loud song designed as an angst-release device.

Listening to Black Francis howling into the foul- mouthed ‘Nimrod’s son’, and many of his other off-kilter verbal and musical phrasings, we don’t necessarily know what’s going on all the time, but this band has such a driving, intelligent, deranged and comical sense of what they’re about that it’s hard to resist going along for the sci-fi ride.

The heavenly summer anthem ‘Here Comes Your Man’ was a thunderous pleasure.

Amazing stuff from the @PIXIES at @LATMofficial , cracking atmosphere!! pic.twitter.com/CDuqCKXKHe

— Cork Music News (@CorkMusicNews) June 30, 2014

Black Francis bellows like a mad preacher on acid, Lovering pummels the skins, Lenchantin gives an undertow of rumbling trouble, and Santiago gives it hell’s bells on a night that’s just terrific fun.

Pixies at the Marquee were a tinnitus-inducing cauldron of industrial level beautiful rock dementia. In a word, a howl.