Some days you wake up and it’s raining. Some days you wake up on the right side of the bed. Sometimes in the middle. And sometimes you wake up and find that another album has been released by Frank Black in any one of his many, and increasingly unnecessary, disguises. In fact we are more likely to wake up and start rifling through the particulars of why Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV adopts one particular alias over another than we are to feel the urge to urinate. So enough of the histrionics. Why Frank Black is using his Pixies moniker really needs no further explanation; it’s his most successful moniker to date and it’s entirely likely that it shifts the most units.
Picking up where Herman Brood tribute album, ‘Bluefinger’ left off, ‘Svn Fngrs’ cobbles together a half-dozen tracks of spiky, teeth-grinding, schizophrenic rock, double-dosed with Black’s amusingly primal and elliptical word-bending vocal freakery – the very same kind of vocal freakery that made tunes like ‘Debaser’ such violent delights in the 90s. He hammered it out then and he’s hammering it out now and there’s few songs hammer it out with more tooth-bucking vigour than ‘The Seus’: scratchy guitar plec’ing, clockwork beatboxing, layers of erratic, criss-crossing vocal lines tossed out with such ludicrous and mindbending abandon as this: ‘to magarrab, to the scarab, all mine with a parrot, all damned defeat, I’m not washing your stinky feet, you’re meat, you’re meat, you’re meat’. It doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t have to. Much like a six-month old child chewing and salivating over a hand on which it is barely able to focus, it has its own imponderable and charming logic. And whilst tracks like ‘Garbage Heap’, ‘The Tale of Lonesome Fetter’ and ‘I Sent Away’ are conventional by comparison, they offer no shortage of vintage Black: scuzzy, impressionistic, prone to violent fits and rolling headlong into obscurity with the classic bass pulse that characterized all those Pixies records.
Black might still be rattling on like the man who we once thought had something vaguely profound to say, but whilst he’s still talking, it seems churlish not to listen.
SVN FNGRS – OUT 03.03.08