Pixies perform 'Doolittle' at Tower Theatre

The classic album concert - wherein a storied and beloved band reunites to perform its career-making album beginning to end, along with all the attendant B-sides - is the latest attempt by the music biz to plug the gaping hole at the bottom of the money pool.

This was the case when the Pixies performed its 1989 art-brut classic, Doolittle, at the Tower Theatre Tuesday night. The show kicked off with a screening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, which was apropos for at least two reasons. First, Pixies front man Black Francis invokes the movie's title on the shrieking chorus of "Debaser," Doolittle's leadoff track. Second, much as in Doolittle, the film's lurid imagery (razor-sliced eyeballs, skin-crawling ants, and pianos filled with dead donkeys) retains the power to shock and confound all these years later.

As the film faded to black, the Pixies took the darkened stage and kicked off the show with the rarely performed B-sides of the Doolittle era - "Manta Ray," "Bailey's Walk," "Weird at My School" - songs, as bassist Kim Deal pointed out, "so obscure we had to learn them to play them live."

After these curiously flavored appetizers, it was on to the main course, which shows no signs of spoilage some 21 years out of the oven. As the Pixies ably demonstrated, Doolittle still plants the freak flag in alt-rock's twilight zone, where lullabies meet blasphemy, waves of mutilation pound forests into driftwood, and all good monkeys go to heaven.

Black Francis can still shriek with hair-on-fire fury, guitarist Joey Santiago still shreds like he made a crossroads deal with the devil, bassist Kim Deal still chugs with hip-swaying power and sings like the Angel of Death, and drummer David Lovering can still bring the locomotion. All four seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as could be expected from a band that never seemed to enjoy itself. After wrapping Doolittle, the band exited stage left, only to return for a lengthy encore that included the remaining B-sides (the glorious suboceanic languor of "Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf Mix)" and the ecstatic, gravity-defying "Into the White") and choice tracks from the pre-Doolittle era, including "Nimrod's Son" and "Vamos," before bringing it all back home with a mesmerizing reading of the song that put the band on the map, "Where Is My Mind?"