In Jewish folklore, a golem is a human-like creature made of mud and animated by the word of a holy man. It's a pale imitation of God's creation of Adam-- close but not quite, because a golem has no free will and can only obey commands. In the most popular version of the myth, a rabbi in Prague creates a golem to protect the city's Jews from persecution, but the monster grows violent and out of control. This golem is a forefather of Frankenstein's monster, a parable about the power and pitfalls of playing god, or really, of any creative endeavor. The things you birth can get away from you; they can take on lives of their own.
The Golem: How He Came Into the World is a 1920 silent film version of the popular story (traditionally, golems also can't speak, which makes them an ideal subject for the pre-talkie era). Lately, film festivals and musicians have made a nice sideline of presenting live scores to such movies, and in 2008, prolific Pixes frontman Black Francis composed a soundtrack to The Golem for the San Francisco International Film Festival. That score was released in a limited run of 500 as a 5xCD set comprising the live performance, studio recordings, and a DVD of the film synched to the soundtrack. (Along with the Pixies' retrospective Minotaur, Francis seems to be developing a thing for monsters and box sets.) Now, Francis has boiled the material down to The Golem Rock Album, a relatively lean, hour-long set of 18 songs whose title suggests that we judge the record as a stand-alone entity. No film screening necessary.
And it is a rock album, as far out from the Prague ghetto as you'd expect Francis to take it-- less old-world beer-hall or chamber music than new weird Americana. The album opens with the familiar, spaced-out surf guitar strum of "Miriam and Florian Theme (Version 2)" but quickly descends into more raucous territory. This golem doesn't lumber and skulk so much as swagger and be-bop and damn near line-dance. Sure, there are vestigial strings and harpsichord and even a waltz, but they're secondary to guitars that range from acoustic strum to western twang to fried bluesy leads-- and to a saxophone that blows through some songs with Morphine-grade melancholy and rips up others with sputtering free-jazz bleat and squeal.
Then there's Francis' multivalent yet unmistakable voice. On "Miriam and Florian", it's that old seductive whine, always just holding back a growl, hiding its teeth. In the final seconds of "Astaroth", he lets it loose, grumbling guttural gibberish and capping the song with three quick, strangulated yips. On "The Maharal", it's pleasantly weathered and hoarse, and elsewhere, it's a low, emotive croon, richer for its years.
The album's lyrics reference the absent film in ways both obvious and obscure. "Meet Me at the Ghetto Gates" is the song that feels most like it was meant for a musical or a rock opera, with its waltz time and its simple, potentially plot-advancing lyrical refrain, although you can just as easily imagine the climactic scene when "The Conjuring" hits its shrieking crescendo ("give! to me! the! word!"). But The Golem's best songs transcend the source material or draw from it themes that weren't originally there. At the album's heart is "The Obedient Servant", a twangy, melancholic ballad that recasts the master-and-servant relationship between the golem and his creator as that of a hopelessly devoted romantic love with Bonnie-and-Clyde overtones: "Hurt he who hurts you/ I will be fervent/ Don't cry, it's they who die."
One wonders if Francis sees something of the golem in his much revered creation, the Pixies, or at least in the legions of fans who can't help but judge his solo work against that band's godlike standard: a monster he brought to life but can't quite kill or control. (The Prague golem is said to be de-activated and stored in a synagogue there; the Pixies occasionally come back to life for a reunion tour.) Well, to add to that mindless lumbering: no, The Golem is not a Pixies album, but it is a Black Francis record that walks and talks surprisingly well even without the master text of its film.
