POP MUSIC REVIEW : Pixies Play Nice and Rough

Starting with their very name, the Pixies are built on ironic contrasts. Far from the benign nature of its moniker, the band’s music erupts from a well of haunted obsession. Its latest album of harsh textures and sharp rhythms is named for a gentle, wispy style of music: “Bossanova.”

At the Universal Amphitheatre on Thursday, the quartet placed the stately elegance of its riffs and rhythms against a racket of disintegration, created suggestions of tenderness dogged by danger, played surf music with an apocalyptic urgency.

Stationed in a stand of columns, each topped with a stage light hunched like a vulture, the four players counteracted their detached manner and oblique slant with intensity and concentration. Leader Black Francis’ singing ranged from a funny whine to a rasp so ferocious it was almost toneless, and Joey Santiago blew the lid off with a drumstick-assisted solo in which he twirled and kicked his guitar into submission.

The Pixies’ first gesture of irony came long before their set, even before second-billed Soul Asylum’s set, in the person of their hand-picked opening act, Blowfly, the cult-figure soul singer and rap precursor. Dressed like a Mexican wrestler, in a gold-sequined hooded mask and a green cape, his BF initials emblazoned on his shirt, the Floridian fronted a sharp, nine-member troupe of players, singers and dancers.

Blowfly made fun of fat people and the college kids in the audience, did dirty parodies of old soul songs, and sang about porn stars and constipation. The crowd actually got into it, bopping to the funk and slowly waving arms on a ballad that advised young men not to get trapped by their women.

The Pixies also play the Ventura Theatre on Friday.