“What we need is more silly men,” declares Frank Black on “Two Reelers,” a salute to the Three Stooges that arrives about halfway through Teenager of the Year, the second album the former Black Francis released after disbanding the Pixies in 1993. His celebration of the idiocy of Larry, Curly, and Moe makes for an unusual statement of purpose—a rallying call for alt-rockers to embrace the freedom of being ridiculous.
Silliness was in scarce supply when Black released Teenager of the Year in May of 1994. Three years after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shot its way into the Hot 100, the alternative rock explosion of the ’90s had acquired a decidedly dour aura, one cultivated by legions of lumbering grunge bands and tortured industrial outfits. The Pixies’ artful nightmares may have softened the ground for the angst-ridden acts jostling for position on MTV’s 120 Minutes, but Black purposefully separated himself from the pack once he launched his solo career. He didn’t hang with the flannel-clad hipsters; he aligned himself with the defiantly geeky They Might Be Giants, the Brooklyn-based college-rock duo he called his “favorite band” during the promotional push for Teenager of the Year—a cycle that included a jaunt opening for TMBG in the fall of ’94.
The fact that he twice took an opening slot for an established act in ’94—in the spring, he went out with the Ramones—could be seen as evidence of Black’s diminishing status within alt-rock circles, but Teenager of the Year suggests that he took deliberately took himself out of the rat race. Teeming with tales of underwater empires and Los Angeles history lessons, the album exists in its own universe, a testament to Black’s wide and varied cultural obsessions. It’s also an album that could only have been made in the mid-’90s, when the CD boom poured enough cash into the music industry for a cult rocker like Black to ensconce himself in posh L.A. studios and indulge his every whim, resulting in an album as lengthy as a double LP—indeed, the only physical edition of the 30th Anniversary reissue is a gold double-vinyl—but not structured like the carefully sculpted gatefold classics of yore. Instead, its contours feel dictated strictly by the capacity of a compact disc: It sprawls until it suddenly stops, not because it reached its destination but because it ran out of road.
Black scattered sharp, carefully sculpted songs throughout the album. One of them, a buoyant piece of power pop called “Headache,” actually did make headway in the alt-rock mainstream; it spent 11 weeks on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts, a run that was longer than either “Los Angeles” or “Hang Onto Your Ego,” the two singles pulled from his eponymous 1993 solo debut. Those punchy numbers are balanced by excursions into dreamy romanticism (“Speedy Marie,” “I Could Stay Here Forever”), invented Western epics (“Calistan”), and suites shrunken to dioramas (“Freedom Rock,” “Olé Mulholland”). Each of these longer pieces serves as guideposts in a record that offers a series of left turns as it swerves from revved-up rockabilly to smooth lovers rock, with Black only occasionally attempting to mitigate the whiplash change of moods. He’s too wrapped up in following his counterintuitive muse to consider pandering to passive listeners.
In charting such a zig-zagging path, Black surrounded himself with eccentric pros such as Eric Drew Feldman, a veteran of a latter-day lineup of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band who spent some time with Pere Ubu while the Ohio art-punks were an opening act for the Pixies. Feldman co-produced Teenager of the Year and anchored a backing band that also featured drummer Nick Vincent and guitarist Lyle Workman, a group that gave Black’s whimsical flights cinematic scope without sacrificing urgency. Black doesn’t shy away from frenetic hardcore rhythms—the album opens with the bracing onslaught of “Whatever Happened to Pong?” and charges toward its close with “Bad Wicked World”—but punk is merely another color in his palette. He no longer sings with the trademark screech he could still unleash as late as Trompe le Monde, the last album released by the first incarnation of the Pixies. He may not yelp, but he’s yet to settle into the middle-aged grumble he’d adopt on latter-day Pixies records; he sounds delighted testing the limits of his range on “Thalassocracy,” a rocker that gains as much momentum from his playful phrasing as it does its rampaging rhythm.
A 90-second burst of aquatic sci-fi and jagged melody, “Thalassocracy” is a prime example of Teenager of the Year’s sense of liberation, as Black reveled in indulging his most esoteric whims. Closing out his contractual commitment with 4AD—he owed the label a pair of albums after pulling the plug on the Pixies—Black had the chance to play with house money, so he holed up in studios owned by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Sergio Mendes, who had sweetened bossa nova for the American mainstream with his band Brasil ’66. It was a far cry from Fort Apache Studios, the grimy location where the Pixies cut their first demos, yet these luxurious cocoons encouraged free-floating creativity: They were hot houses for his creativity, however absurd it might be.
That freedom infuses Teenager of the Year with a palpable jolt of joy, one that carries through to the occasional moments of cacophony; they’re not provocations, they’re celebrations of noise. The ensuing decades have seen Black back away from these high spirits as well as this kind of widescreen production, choosing to keep things stripped down with the Catholics and, eventually, the reunited Pixies. The retreat was practical: Without the support of a large label, it didn’t make sense to while away the hours in elite studios, so he kept working on the cheap. That leaves Teenager of the Year as an oddity in his catalog—the culmination of the space-besotted adventures Black Francis began back with Bossanova but also a wonderfully odd outlier, a record that feels like it offers a direct line into the deepest reaches of Frank Black’s imagination.
