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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
 Posted - 09/04/2003 : 01:45:03
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By Stuart Henderson:
Innovation, energy and that special, unbottleable sonic intensity pervaded their work, and in turn, coloured some of the best of the early-90s grunge/alternative scene. So what happened to their Black Francis, lately reborn as the frustratingly straightforward Frank Black?
Black’s first record following the break-up of his 16-year marriage, and said (in the drily funny press release which accompanied the disc) to be a collection of “thirteen big, salty tears”, just doesn’t have the emotional impact you’d think it would. Perhaps it is Black’s propensity for keeping his listeners at a distance - even here, in pseudo-confessional mode, his habit of employing dark humour and an acerbic, sardonic wit can diminish the seriousness of the material. Or, perhaps it is his reliance on basic rock’n’roll structures which tend to de-emphasise his lyrics, deflating our emotional investment. Or, most exasperatingly, perhaps it is because Show Me Your Tears is, on the whole, about the most derivative record I have heard from a major artist in months.
It is a strange thing to review a record such as this - I enjoy it, even love parts of it. I’m singing along out loud in the car on a roadtrip. But I can’t escape the unfortunate reality that at least half (more?) of the 13 songs here sound as if they have been plucked from the mind of someone else. The raucous opener “Nadine”, good as it is, sounds so much like the Doors that it prompted me to put on Morrison Hotel (a mistake). The remainder of the record can be treated as a kind of sonic Sunday Challenge - who is Black appropriating now?
Some hints: “Everything is New” is carried on a pop hook that listeners will remember from Springsteen’s “The River”; “New House of the Pope” borrows the entire piano line from Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”; in the rollicking “Jaina Blues”, Black does his best John Fogerty, while “The Snake” finds him delivering a pitch perfect Lou Reed impression. What’s going on here?
And yet, “Horrible Day” is a great, funny, bleak rocker, the endlessly catchy “Goodbye Lorraine” is up to the task of being both amusing and depressing at the same time, “Massif Centrale” is a solid, compulsively listenable rocker, and “When Will Happiness Find Me Again?” (“The country was nothing but trees/So I went to the city one day”) is a beautiful, simple song worthy of repeated listens.
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
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