Then again, Jay and his new backing band (the old one quit on him in October) were competing against a band that’s already got their legacy firmly entrenched. Like many bands in the opening slot, the vast majority of the crowd in the Hammerstein Ballroom wasn’t there to see them, but rather, a reunion of one of the most important and influential bands of the past twenty-five years. Moreover, that aforementioned band was playing its arguably most beloved work, start to finish, complete with all of its B-sides. This wasn’t just a reunion, it was a victory lap.

And so, with the outcome predetermined, Jay and the new Reatards got on stage and played one of the most aggressive sets that I’ve ever seen. They played for just under 40 minutes; they may have blasted through 20 full songs. There was no stage banter, and there was rarely a lull. Instead, Jay would ramp his way through a song, let loose a blast of feedback, bark out the title of the next song, and, with little more warning than that, immediately get into the next. Breathless isn’t quite the word.

Sadly, his energy wasn’t echoed by the crowd, since most of the spectators were there for the main event. They looked anxious for the Pixies to go on; by contrast, Jay looked a little uneasy with the size of the enormous stage he was standing on. It was far from the ideal setting to see Reatard, and if at all possible, I cannot urge you enough to see him at one of his own shows.

And, umm, yeah, Pixies.

There isn’t really much else that needs to be said about the tour at this point, since everyone vaguely knows the story. The Cliff’s notes go like this: the band was a creative force in the late 1980s, released two more albums and then broke up in 1993. More than a decade later, they reunited and have been doing infrequent appearances at festivals ever since, despite only recording one new song since their reunion (2004’s “Bam Thwok,” rejected for the Shrek 2 soundtrack).

After seeing them this go-around, I’m still not sure if they even like each other. The band stayed in their respective quadrants of the stage through the entire show, and there might have been ten words spoken between them. In fact, the only person that I saw crack a smile on stage was bassist Kim Deal. This uneasy peace between the band members translated into a bit of an awkward start, especially with the show’s start: an introductory projection of Salvatore Dali’s surrealist film Un chien andalou (“SLICIN’ UP EYEBALLS, I WANT YOU TO KNOOOOOOOW!”) and four B-sides, each separated by some clumsy Deal schtick (“This is a B-side so old even we had to relearn it!”).

But once the bass intro and shrill chords of “Debaser” rang out, it wasn’t hard to remember what warranted this victory lap in the first place. After all, Doolittle still holds up 20 years later, a brisk 38 minutes that moves effortlessly across musical styles but never feels unfocused. Even more importantly, unlike a lot of bands that decide to reunite, the Pixies showed no real signs of decline. All of the instrumentation sounded great; more importantly, Black Francis’s alternate screaming and whispers sound just as urgent as they were twenty years before.

Those who like their live acts to do a bit of improvisation may have left this show disappointed: the first twenty-one songs of the set (all of Doolittle’s tracks and B-sides) have been set in stone from night one, and they were essentially note-for-note renditions. And on this particular night, the second of four shows in New York on this tour, the encore was slightly lackluster as well, at least by comparison to the previous night’s monster ending of “Where Is My Mind?” and “Gigantic.”

Night two’s crowd was rewarded with a spastic rendition of goofy Surfer Rosa track “Broken Face,” as well as underrated early track “Caribou.” By that point, it really wouldn’t have mattered, as the crowd was more than satisfied. After all, Doolittle, one year away from drinking age, is an adult now. It can speak for itself.

In that aspect, and many others, NYU’s Halloween concert at Le Poisson Rouge, “A Refined Evening of Hardcore,” was a huge success. The concert featured seven acts, and all except for headliners Pissed Jeans spent part of their time on stage masquerading as other bands, incorporating covers into their sets. Lucky concertgoers saw Brooklyn garage rockers Awesome Color putting their own profane spin on Sly and the Family Stone, as well as Ex-Wife covering their Jersey brethren Saves the Day. In addition, My Mind and Drunkdriver each took on 1980s hardcore bands in Void and Christian Death respectively.

Though each of the bands generally kept the spirit of the evening by playing their songs in costume, no one quite took it as far as Pissed Jeans, who made up for their lack of covers with a surplus of spectacle. Most of the other bands played dress-up; singer Matt Korvette got into character. Wearing one of the loudest dresses ever conceived by man, dark red lipstick, and an incredible blonde wig, the frontman, mild-mannered and polite during load-in, transformed before our very eyes. He bellowed at an audience member to “bring [him] an appletini.” He scolded me for letting loose a wolf-whistle when he first got on stage. Best of all, he flirted with the crowd while slapping fans away that were trying to see under his dress. Korvette certainly wasn’t giving it up that easily.

His band wasn’t to be outdone. Bassist Randy Huth patrolled the stage in full Tigger costume, while the group’s drummer, Matt McGuinness, showed off a purple dress of his own (this one with sequins!) while the band sludged through their songs. To say the least, their performance was one to watch, a more than fitting end to the evening.

While early promises of blood and vomit never came to fruition, NYPD were called in at one point after, according to NYU Local, “an unruly non-NYU show-goer ‘had an altercation’ with a female bartender.” For an evening that got increasingly rowdy as it progressed, this wasn’t a total surprise. In fact, it wouldn’t have felt right without some police activity.

All in all, “A Refined Evening of Hardcore” strayed pretty far from the refined end of things, and frankly, with the notable exception of Matt Korvette, all of the guys who wore dresses were pretty far from ladylike. The hundreds who came out to LPR that evening would hardly have had it any other way.

The band is known for its lively psych-folk tunes, but Wednesday night the songs took on a new edge; every song seemed a little bit more urgent in a live setting. Vibraphonist Keaton Snyder incorporated himself nicely into the old material, most notably on an extended intro to “Fools.” Though the set list was almost exclusively from Visiter and Time to Die, in their second encore the band came out with “The Ball” from their debut album Beware of the Maniacs, ending with Kroeber punching through several of his drum heads.

So to answer your question: yes, a psych-folk band can destroy a stage, and had Snyder smashed that vibraphone, it might have been a perfect night. But as it stands, what the crowd at the Bowery got was pretty good too.

No, the album isn’t the most cohesive, spanning several genres from Krautrock to jazz, with a lot in between. Yes, there are goofy songs like “I Can Be a Frog,” a singalong complete with Karen O making screeching animal noises, and throwaways like late-album track “The Impulse.” Inevitably, Embryonic falls into the same trap that most double-albums of the last twenty years have: show me a good double-album, and I’ll show you a release that could have lost a few tracks to become an even better single LP. Had Embryonic lost just a few of its eighteen tracks, it could rank with classics Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin as some of the band’s best work. But an album like this was probably meant to be taken as a whole, warts and all. This is the follow-up to Yoshimi that the fearless freak fans of the Flaming Lips deserve.