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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
 Posted - 09/10/2003 : 02:17:34
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A review by Dave Queen, 7.7 out of 10. Dated 9.9.03:
Frank Black and the Catholics
Show Me Your Tears
Cooking Vinyl
2003
{7.7}
That ‘Rolling Stone 100 Best Guitarists’ issue – what crap, they should be ‘strung up’! Or ‘axed’! No Keith Levene, no James Williamson, no Yngwie Malmsteen – and worst of all, no Joey Santiago!! Burn that and buy this instead, cuz Joey’s here! (Proof if any were needed that ‘they’ were a ‘BAND’. Not just Deal and Black as the respective Jagger/Richards)
Frank Black = Keith? Well yes. “Nobody’s gonna like my album after only one listen” sez the PR. Not true, I liked it just fine, in a Keith-solo-album way. Pure formalism enjoyment. Like R Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, premise of which being there is 6 to the power of 6 to the power of 6 alternate ways to rock out the same ol’ blues plus being a singer-songwriter avoiding both the programmatic and the reflexive. And if the devil is 6 then God is 7!
(Back to the RS list – Kirk Hammett over Hanneman/King? Burn in ‘hell’!) The second time I listened I liked it better though, because before that I thought “there’s too many instruments on here”. Like I did with Exile…, I thought it was supposed to be a down-and-dirty cement-mixer churn and there turned out to be horns and shit. But then I got to like it because the more grounded in references the music gets the better the vocal tics sound, sparingly applied as they may be. The sound of the sliced eyeball may be gone forever, alas, but there’s other distractions like the falsetto in “Massif Centrale” that comes out of nowhere for one verse, and the mewl of “Jaina Blues”, which Jeffrey Dahmer got repeatedly ejected from the courtroom for practicing during testimony.
Santiago is of course great and ‘The Catholics’ is an oddly apposite name for his backing band. This is North London collection-plate-pub music of a very high calibre. Old boozer music to raucously and inadvertently spit Old Holborn Phlegm onto the sawdust with. At times it sounds like Bruce Springsteen’s Rising if it was played and produced by French people, extraordinarily adept ones at that. “Jaina Blues” even has a ‘house’ piano for a few seconds! “Massif Centrale” works as a very moving tribute to soon-to-be-goner Warren ‘French Inhaler’ Zevon as well. “Massif Centrale”, “Manitoba” – France? Canada? Well, those are the threats to Amerikkka now, i.e. not outer space, or the planet of sound!
Outer space is so last millennium anyway. Frank may be back to Earth now, but he seems to like it, or it at least make the ennui rowdy’n’rollicking. Once he made a famous slobbering paean to Bunuel, and later a ruminative meditation on David Lynch (“I Gotta Move” from Pistolero), but now he’s “sold my VCR for some pocket cash”. “Goodbye Lorraine” is actually a straightforward linear narrative about escaping some crazy Wiccan, and another (my favourite) line goes “I believed in the fates/ I thought they were great”, but it’s delivered the same as Horrible Day’s “you can tell by my grin, I just don’t give a fuck!”
And you know how singer-songwriter records work – if they don’t give a fuck, then there is a better chance that you will! Well, not ‘give a fuck’ like you would about (probably, knowing ‘you’) a bunch of bands that got signed yesterday who are rediscovering the simplest outcroppings of stuff Frank Black mastered and forgot years ago, but certainly ‘give’ more of ‘a fuck’ than you would for solo albums by, say, Dave Grohl or Chris Cornell or Mick Jagger. (Tom Araya, we’re still waiting!)
And this isn’t a solo record anyway, it’s a BAND record! By Frank Black and the Catholics, featuring Joey Santiago with appearances from Stan Ridgway and Eric Drew Feldman, and they love what they’re doing and are also good at it. And as he says in unique French Springsteen style, “Everything is new/ when the sky is blue/ everything to do.”
(Hold on – that sounds PROTESTANT!)
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
Edited by - Ten Percenter on 09/10/2003 02:18:57 |
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"Who the Hell is Frank Black? / I'm just in it for the free beer"