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Frank Black-O-Rama! #11: DEATH TO THE PIXIES

Pixies
Death to the Pixies
1997, 4AD/Elektra

Just ahead of the start of my favorite era of Frank Black’s music (the hard-touring, prolific years of Frank Black and the Catholics) came this Pixies retrospective.

It’s worth talking about because it accompanied a change in the narrative. Time brings new thoughts and new angles on old events and the story of the Pixies was a little different after this.

That band had been done for five years at this point and 4AD deemed it a good time to give them a nice headstone in the form of a double CD that offered something for the newbies (a “best of” collection on disc 1) and something for the old fans (a vintage live set on disc 2).

To promote it, Frank Black hit the press circuit and, for the first time in years, talked about his old band as something beyond a bad memory. After all, a collection like this calls for writers to go on about a group’s legacy and their history and how their music holds up.

That meant that the Pixies’ break-up drama was no longer the main topic.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #76: THE PIPE DREAMS OF INSTANT PRINCE WHIPPET

Guided by Voices
The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Were the nineteen songs of Universal Truths and Cycles not enough for you? Do you want more universal truths? Might you be interested in further cycles?

If so, Merry Christmas because this ten-song set of B-sides and castaways shortly followed the album. The band recorded a pile of songs while trying to figure out what the hell Universal Truths and Cycles was supposed to be. Going by this collection, they ruthlessly left off some punchy pop that didn’t fit on the LP’s sprawling trip.

Robert Pollard loves his contrasts and this record is less of a whirlwind than the album. It’s more blunt. It just rocks.

Even the title is a contrast.

Universal Truths and Cycles sounds big and important.

The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet conjures up a guy who’s having too much fun with cans of whipped cream. He has big thoughts himself though, and they’ll get even bigger with his next hit of nitrous oxide.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #10: THE CULT OF RAY

Frank Black
The Cult of Ray
1996, American Recordings

I don’t know why Frank Black parted ways with his longtime label, 4AD. If he’s ever commented on it, I haven’t seen it. All I can say is that his first album for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings–home at the time to the likes of The Black Crowes, Johnny Cash, and Slayer–feels like (and was) his last-ditch effort at a solo hit in the dying days of “Alternative Rock”. The mood is punchy and aggressive and Black leans hard into his sci-fi guy persona.

As weird as they are, his previous two solo albums are all about pop. They come in candy-colored packages and boast bright production with several tracks ready for radio. They never caught on in a big way, but they have their cult (count me among them) and they’ve aged well.

They also come off like their own little era that burned itself out quick.

Or, to put it another way, how do you follow up Teenager of the Year, a double-length oddball epic that starts with Pong and ends with apocalypse?

The best way is to not even try. Answer that album’s layered, synthetic production with more simple, raw production. Answer its twenty-two tracks with a tight thirteen. Answer its complex maze of topics with a batch of songs that roughly break it all down to kids and UFOs and one mother of a lead guitar.

That’s The Cult of Ray.

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Cody McFadyen’s SHADOW MAN

Cody McFadyen, Shadow Man (2006, Bantam)

I was looking for a good “summer book”. Something brisk and entertaining and who cares if it’s a little light on logical sense?

I picked this one and in my first few sittings I thought I’d made a mistake because it’s so damn bleak. After every chapter, I needed a hug just to feel better about being alive. 

As you keep going though, the silly things begin to pile up and up and then they start to come at you fast until the whole shebang takes the shape of an ultra-commercial thriller obviously intended to kick off a series (and if Hollywood is interested, it’s ready). Yes, it has harsh violence and grotesque crime scenes, but what’s more commercial than that these days? Who in the 21st century wants to read about someone getting beaned with a candlestick in a billiard room? No, we want serial killers raping and murdering as told in unsettling detail. 

THAT’S what we want to read on the beach–and I’m not kidding. 

I kept turning these pages, at least, though I’m not on a beach. 

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #75: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the album)

Guided by Voices
Universal Truths and Cycles
2002, Matador Records

This album came out in June of 2002 and it ruled my summer. I spent the whole sweaty season thinking about these nineteen songs again and again. In 2021, I still do.

The only good thing about my depressing new office job back then was that you could live in your headphones all day. It was a lifeless setting in which I craved lively music. Singer-songwriters and slow stuff never lasted long in my portable tape deck (before download codes and cheap digital players came later in the decade, dubbed cassettes were the least fussy way to listen to your vinyl away from home).

I needed music that rocked and made bold leaps between moods. I wanted albums that you could live with and ponder and have a different favorite song every time you played it. More than ever, I needed music that sounded like a world to explore, a place to go when you’re lost.

Man, it was as if Universal Truths and Cycles was made just for me.

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THE SPARKS BROTHERS (2021)

The Sparks Brothers

2021, Director: Edgar Wright

When I first heard Sparks, they felt like one of those brilliant secrets of the used vinyl bins that you run into from time to time. For a few years, that was the only place I ever encountered them (never saw them in the CD racks at all). In the 90s, most old records were treated like the unwanted mess left over from yesterday’s party. Prices were low even on a lot of classic stuff and on a good day, I could get my hands on some real jewels for shockingly little money.

You bought records based on cool cover art a lot of the time and I’m pretty sure that’s why I went for Kimono My House one day. 

I paid my $3.99 for it, took it home (well, to my dorm), slipped on the headphones, laid the needle down on the record and then when “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” started to pound, explode, and do melodic somersaults in my ears, it was one of those “holy shit” moments. It’s not just a great song; it’s a song that can feel like it’s changing you, like it’s sending you in a strange new direction somehow. 

That song turned up loud and coming at you from left field is still my personal pick for the best way to discover Sparks. 

The second best way? In 2021, Edgar Wright’s documentary feels good to me. It’s a lively, energizing film that I’d happily recommend to someone who’s new to the curious of path of Ron and Russell Mael. 

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Ed McBain’s COP HATER

Ed McBain
Cop Hater
1956, Signet

The heat wave that takes over the city here is a primitive metaphor for the pressure that the 87th Precinct feels, from the press, from the public and from themselves, to crack the case of a shooter who’s popping off plainclothes police detectives brazenly in the streets.

That’s not a putdown.

This is a primitive book and it doesn’t ask for you to think of it as anything but that. Its meat is the investigation procedural, an almost journalistic account of how fingerprints are read and how two strands of hair and a blood pattern on a sidewalk can reveal ten facts about an escaped perpetrator. Its characters are mere side items. Guys with guns and women with secrets.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #74: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the single)

Guided by Voices
“Universal Truths and Cycles” b/w “Beg for a Wheelbarrow”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

This is the fourth and final* 7″ teaser single released before the Universal Truths and Cycles album would hit the racks of your local Camelot Music in the summer of 2002 and it’s got the best B-side of the batch.

(*There were some European CD singles with repeated A-sides and that offered even more non-album tracks, but those can wait for a compilation EP that’s coming up soon.)

The flip here is called “Beg for a Wheelbarrow” and it’s a sinister beast meant for a band who can summon real thunder. It builds tension in an insistent post-punk march and then releases it in a haunting acapella section. Pollard’s words are about being broke, in debt and under the boot heel.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #9: BLACK SESSIONS – LIVE IN PARIS

Frank Black
The Black Sessions – Live in Paris plus The Kitchen Tapes
1995, Anoise Annoys

If you were in the US and you wanted to keep up with Frank Black in the 90s, you had to buy a bunch of import CDs from Europe. In addition to the singles (most American labels didn’t bother with those at the time unless the band was a major cash cow), there was The John Peel Session EP from the UK in 1995. The next year, there was the Euro edition of The Cult of Ray, which included a second CD with four bonus tracks. Later still in 1998, was the first Frank Black and the Catholics album, which came out on the Belgian label Play It Again Sam several months before it came out anywhere else.

Eh, I didn’t mind. I thought that was cool, even if it cost me a few extra bucks.

Plus, it helped that most of this stuff was easy to get at the time. Not only were record stores more plentiful, but even some of the mega-chains were on a mission to stock every CD that they possibly could to fill their miles of rack space devoted to loss leaders and that’s how I was able to go to the blindingly corporate Best Buy in the shitty suburb of Mesquite, TX in 1996 and scoop up this UK live album.

Sometimes I miss the mid-90s. Then I remember how bad my hair was and am glad that we all moved on.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #73: EVERYWHERE WITH HELICOPTER

Guided by Voices
“Everywhere With Helicopter” b/w “Action Speaks Volumes”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Rock is the word and the word is rock for this third 7″ on the ramp up to GBV’s indie rock homecoming album, Universal Truths and Cycles.

“Everywhere With Helicopter” is as commercial a single as Guided by Voices ever put out. Your average radio call-in contestant for Foo Fighters tickets in 2002 could easily get into its Nirvana-like kick. Meanwhile, Pollard’s melody ascends, descends, spins and attacks like an expertly flown Air Force jet maneuver. Every verse is a rocket that takes out a target.

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