Frank Black & the Catholics
The question isn’t how Charles Thompson IV will be remembered–it’s what name he’ll be remembered by. It could be Black Francis, the name he used as front man for the Pixies. It could be Frank Black, the name he adopted when he went solo. For the indecisive, it could be Frank Black Francis. But how he will be remembered is already obvious: as one of the premier architects of a generation of rock that altered the course of the music industry. In the mid-80s Black (as we’ll call him here) wrapped sweet melodies in jagged packages: his songs had the energy of punk but were infinitely more interesting; they had the structural smarts of pop but exorcised a few more demons. Throughout five equally strong albums with the Pixies, Black managed to scream and wail, well, hummably.
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Black is unquestionably an icon. Kurt Cobain’s admiration and admitted creative debt have already been well documented. Bob Mould has confessed that an early song he wrote with his band Sugar, “A Good Idea,” was a rewrite of “Debaser,” the lead track on the Pixies’ Doolittle. And today Modest Mouse’s shrieking vocals and heart-stopping tempo shifts border on copyright infringement. But the benefits of his stature seem to have been lost with the name change. The posthumous Death to the Pixies, a two-disc compilation of live tracks and greatest hits released in late 1997, has outsold Black’s last two albums.
But Black’s not ready for the glue factory yet. If Frank Black and the Catholics wasn’t perfect, it was a first step into a decidedly new arena. It rocked, though it didn’t quite roll–Black and his band sounded tentative, afraid to get sloppy; most of the songs plowed straight ahead for three or four minutes and then they were over. But Pistolero is dirtier than anything he’s made in years, and in certain flashes of energy and presence it’s almost as good as anything he’s ever made. “Bad Harmony,” for example, opens with a few drumbeats, then launches into a full-band blast that builds until the first verse, when everything but the electric guitar drops out; subsequent starts and stops shift the weight around like the bead in a hula hoop, sending the song rocketing around your head for the duration. Black even screams a little, a bone to the old fans. Some of the other tracks sputter quickly and go nowhere (“I Want Rock & Roll”), and some are silly gimmicks (the dreadful “I Love Your Brain”). But the best songs on Pistolero are full of a swagger and groove that sounds more like the Stones or Neil Young than anything from the alternative era, Pixies or otherwise.
