Tag: Frank Black

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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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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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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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Frank Black-O-Rama! #8: THE JOHN PEEL SESSION

Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub
The John Peel Session
1995, Strange Fruit

It’s a 1960s rock ‘n’ roll dance party! This fast and loud 4-song EP bridges the gap between screamin’ Frank Black and screamin’ Freddy Cannon. It burns up the dragstrip. It rips into old school sounds that Black tastefully hinted at in past moments such as his “Duke of Earl” cover for the 1993 Hello Recording Club EP and his own starry ballad “Sir Rockaby” from Teenager of the Year. It’s rough and wired with no synthesizers or UFOs anywhere.

The time was May 1994. Teenager of the Year was brand new. Black was in Europe doing promotional stuff. Like the Pixies several times before, he got invited to record a set for John Peel at the BBC, which is always cool, BUT… he didn’t have a band. He would soon have a band for the upcoming tour, but at the moment, no hay banda.

So he asked Scottish guitar pop heroes Teenage Fanclub to back him up. They said yes and everyone got together to bang out four exclusive tracks fueled by classic influences. It was a performance worth savoring enough that Peel’s own label Strange Fruit put it out on disc the following year.

The first thing you notice about it: NO Teenager of the Year songs. Not even any of the B-sides. What you get instead are two covers and two Black originals that hadn’t yet appeared anywhere else.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #7: TEENAGER OF THE YEAR

Frank Black
Teenager of the Year
1994, Elektra/4AD

I have a weakness for “overstuffed suitcase” albums. I love long, unwieldy track-lists. Lots of songs, lots of moods, lots of mixed reviews from the critics.

Albums that have thirty-seven tracks on ’em for no special reason other than that’s what happened. Somebody tipped over the toybox, made a big mess, and decided that the room looked better that way.

My favorites sound almost like accidents. They aren’t conceptual rock operas. There’s no grand, four-sided double album vision (many of them aren’t even double albums). No, they overflow because that’s how the wind was blowing and the artist is okay with looking crazy. It’s okay to look crazy in rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, I’d recommend it.

Frank Black has looked crazy before. He continues to look crazy here, starting with the cover photo.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #6: FRANK BLACK

Frank Black
Frank Black
1993, 4AD/Elektra

In the Pixies, Black Francis wrote fun, memorable songs about surrealism and aliens, but he didn’t get really weird until he flipped his stage name and became rock music’s top science nerd.

Why the change? The break-up of the old band was just that bitter, I guess. He had to wash it off. Treat it like something best forgotten. He wouldn’t even play Pixies songs live for five years.

There was also something punk rock about it in an old school way. It gave off street cred. In their early 80s heyday, the likes of Black Flag and Husker Du played live shows typically dominated by their new stuff even when it wasn’t yet out on a record. Leaning on your past is what tired old rock stars do. Real motherfuckers move forward.

So, on that note, meet Frank Black, 4AD’s newest pop sensation! Hear his hopelessly strange “debut” of brilliant songs that surf on waves of crisp, synthetic sounds. It was also his best and most eccentric work yet at the time.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #5: TROMPE LE MONDE

Pixies
Trompe le Monde
1991, 4AD/Elektra

The Pixies’ break-up is not an interesting story.

There are MUCH more juicy rock music scandals out there. There are bands who ended because of murder. Or suicide. Or murder-suicides. Some bands ended because someone in it was certifiably insane. There are bands who ended with shotgun blasts, overdoses, plane crashes and prison sentences. Some performers died on stage. Other bands went down in a flurry of lawsuits. Sex, violence, money, drugs and mental illness have all collided in some combination or another throughout music history to result in some real harrowing soap operas.

How did the Pixies end?

With a fax.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #4: BOSSANOVA

Pixies
Bossanova
1990, 4AD/Elektra

Mainstream opinion puts the first two Pixies albums on a pedestal and then treats the next two as lesser lights. There’s always somebody around who insists that Doolittle is their best. It was definitive, they might say. It’s the perfect snapshot of the band’s personality. The peak of their screaming surrealism and pulverizing pop. Doolittle was the album on which the band sharpened their blade as good as it was ever gonna get.

There are some cuddly songs on Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, sure, but the shine was off the chrome–or maybe it was TOO shiny as the band got more comfortable in bed with producer Gil Norton, who had a real ear for how to make these strange songs sound like sugar.

Now, I disagree. I disagree so much that I declare Bossanova my favorite of the original Pixies albums. I think it’s great. If the previous records are played-out to the max in my world, this one is still breezy and fun to me. It’s a perfect pop album. It makes me bounce off the walls.

Still, I do understand the detractors to a degree. While Bossanova isn’t a total departure–it’s still no-nonsense screamy rock music–there ARE differences from what came before.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #3: DOOLITTLE

Pixies
Doolittle
1989, 4AD/Elektra

I can’t listen to Doolittle anymore. I don’t hate it, but I’m finished with it.

There was a time when I loved it. There was a time when it was everything to me. It was my first Pixies album and right away, I thought that it was as good as music got. After my very first listen, I had a new favorite band (“Sorry, Beatles, you’re now #2”). No music had ever punched me in the face like that before. No music had ever screamed at me like that before. It was raw blunt force trauma with catchy hooks. The songs were jagged and jittery. They were quick little things that sliced through space and time like razors. And they were all so good and instantly infectious, not to mention darkly funny. They were stuck in my head all day, a constant source of energy and inspiration.

And now I’m done with it. Have been for at least fifteen years. I think I used it all up.

I was 19 and a total dork in 1995 when I bought Doolittle at a used CD store and Black Francis was 23 when he made it. A whole lot of life was waiting to happen to both of us. Over time, I think both he and I would relate less and less to this album’s shrieking young smartass, however brilliant he was, and move on to other things.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #2: SURFER ROSA

Pixies
Surfer Rosa
1988, 4AD/Elektra

Surfer Rosa is one of those great albums that a band makes once and then never makes again.

That’s not an insult to the other Pixies LPs, all of which I like. The later albums may even have better songs overall, but this one is uniquely apocalyptic. Every crazed and ridiculous (and infectious) song on it feels like one piece of an atomic bomb. Once it’s all put together–BOOM!

They can never do what they did here again. You shouldn’t expect it from them. They will never be this age again. It will never be 1988 again. Their ideas will never seem this strange again. They will never again have the energy of a band who don’t know if they have a future so they’re using up everything they’ve got right now.

At the very least, an upstart band who are capable of could-be/should-be hits such as “Gigantic” and “Where is My Mind?” will almost always try, in time, to make records that are at least a liiiittle bit more slick and shiny than their first. They’re clearly ambitious. They’re not dedicated to being noisy scum-rockers. They’re going to evolve.

Hey, it’s only a sell-out if it sucks.

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