Music Review: Black Francis - Bluefinger - Page 2

As I ask the question, I hear Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis, cough, then laugh dryly, then advise me to go f*cking die.

But there is something to the change of name, for sure. Or else this would have been the fifteenth release credited to Frank Black. So is this a change of soul? Or just of, you'll pardon this squarest of thoughts, brand?

MBA voice over: The Black Francis brand stands for slicing up eyeballs, screaming, quiet loud quiet, being the band that inspired Nirvana, and being the most awesome band ever. The Frank Black brand stands for a workmanlike approach to rock and roll. Direct to two track. Country rock. Low sales. As he sang in "Chip Away Boy," "I used to have some fun/Me and everyone/Now I'm just employed."

And that may be all there is to it. Except:

Exhibit A: "Captain Pasty." Mars attacking. Irregular meters. And that awesome growl-laugh that opens up the track. It will make your car go like nitrous, if you happen to be behind the wheel when you are listening.

Exhibit B: "Tight Black Rubber," with its Fugazi meets Nirvana bass + guitar duet settling into a Meat Puppets meets Velvets chugging rocker full of tension and bondage tropes.

Exhibit C: "Your Mouth Into Mine." Could be a Frank Black song, except the spaces between the verses run over with Black Francis's love-as-body-invasion imagery at a speed that feels at once relaxed and chemically enhanced. Love never sounded so much like theft.

Exhibit D: "You Can't Break a Heart and Have It." The one song on the album that provides a tight connection to the album's supposed inspiration, Dutch artist/musician/drug user Herman Brood, whose song this was before Black Francis made it his own.

Exhibit E: "Threshold Apprehension." A romp through Pixies touchstones, from high pitched, screaming vocals to four-chord hooks to girlish spoken background vocals (courtesy Charles’s wife Violet Clark) to two of the finest couplets in post-Pixies rock: "Every little sh*t gotta find his salt lick/If I don't find my babe I'm gonna be junk sick" and "Grand Marnier and a pocketful of speed/We did it all night til we started to bleed." The hit single the Pixies should have had in the summer of 2007, showing up first as a bonus track on the best of compilation Frank Black 93-03. Your reviewer was stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike the first time he heard the song and nearly rear-ended the car in front of him, so immediately propulsive was the impact of the song, and so hard was he laughing with the force of the bliss coming at him from six speakers.

Article Author: Timothy Jarrett

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