For a few years, Charles K. Thompson, better known as Frank Black or Black Francis, has been inching toward Bluefinger. Though he's been Frank Black on his records ever since the Pixies split in the early 1990s, signs that he was itching for a return to his rowdier, weirder, louder Black Francis persona have recently abounded. Most obviously, he's participated in a successful Pixies reunion, performing all the old favorites for new audiences, but more telling was his solo re-examination of Pixies material on his 2004 release Frank Black Francis.
He spent 2005 and 2006 in Nashville, making some of his quietest records, but in a lot of ways, those albums provided the perfect set-up for the return of Black Francis. Strangely, Black himself claims that the inspiration for resurrecting his old moniker had nothing to do with the Pixies or even himself, and everything to do with a deceased Dutch punk. According to Black, he was "gripped by the spirit of Herman Brood" while recording the bonus track for his 93-03 best of collection, released this summer.
Brood (it's pronounced "Broat") was a long-time fixture on the Netherlands music scene-- he played piano in the Nederbeat group Cuby & the Blizzards in the 60s and later founded his own band. Brood was romantically linked to Nina Hagen in the 80s and achieved a great deal of prominence in his home country. He also had terrible problems with hard drugs for much of his life, and ultimately his health was so degraded that he committed suicide by leaping from the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton rather than wait for his ailments to take him.
It's easy to get what Black sees in Brood-- they have a lot in common aesthetically. Brood's music ranges from loud, hard punk to cabaret and even a bit of bizarre swing pastiche-- another thing they have in common is that neither man has always stuck to his strengths. A great deal of Bluefinger was written with Brood in mind-- he's even directly named on one song, and there's a cover of his "You Can't Break a Heart and Have It". As the album gets going, it's clear we're in much different territory than any of the Nashville sessions ventured into. The lineup here is a simple trio of Black on guitar and vocals, Jason Carter on drums and Dan Schmid on bass, with backing vocals by Violet Clarke.
The album opens with the nastiest rock blast we've had from Black in ages, with the charging one-two of "Captain Pasty" and "Threshold Apprehension", which was the bonus track on 93-03. The bass and guitar sound on "Captain Pasty" harks back to "Los Angeles", but it's "Threshold" where the full, manic intensity implied by the switch back to the old name first comes out. The song is a ragged, pounding stomper, and Black's yelping, tweaked-out vocal performance is very nearly Pixies vintage.
Of course, Pixies weren't a one-note band, and a bunch of flailing punk songs with no variation wouldn't exactly reflect the Black Francis spirit Black is revisiting here. The album is varied, with a few songs that are closer in sound to his Catholics output and a couple that even reflect his time in Nashville, such as the harmonica-drenched "Lolita". The production is unfortunately dry and straightforward, with little in the way of post-production add-ons or reverb-- this has never served Black particularly well, and there are stretches where the music sounds bland because of the depthless recording approach.
Black's partial tribute to Brood is good and bad-- Brood's personal travails provide good fodder for songs, but the homage gets downright awkward in places, none moreso than on "Angels Come to Comfort You", which almost reads as a congratulation to Brood for his suicide. Over a rockabilly-ish backing, Black retreats from the surreal imagery and abrupt juxtapositions that serve him well on the rest of the record in favor of lines like, "He played piano really fucking good," and "He was no saint/ But he was Dutch/ So he could paint." The song is somewhat salvaged by a great coda featuring Clarke's wordless vocals layered into a choir of angels.
There are only a few small points that actually sound like his work with the Pixies, so don't come in expecting a throwback to Doolittle-- besides, who's truly holding him to the standard of his old band these days? Frank Black solo will always be different no matter what he calls himself. *Bluefinger * is the best overall solo record Black has released in a long time, but it's still only good, not great. It will likely please a few fans who were getting sick of his "Frank Black + Studio Giants" phase, but we're also speaking relatively. Overall, this basically splits the difference between Frank Black and Black Francis, producing a few good songs but only rarely justifying the name switch.
