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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
 Posted - 07/17/2005 : 00:04:18
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A review by David Cheal, potato-headed loon anyone??:
Frank Black
Honeycomb
Cooking Vinyl, £11.99
Shortly before last year's triumphant Pixies reunion tour, the band's big cheese Frank Black headed to a studio in Nashville run by producer Jon Tiven, where he brought to fruition a project on which he had been ruminating for a decade: an album of covers and original songs with a rootsy, countrified, old-time rock and roll flavour, performed by legendary session figures such as Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham (whose old Memphis partner Dan Penn engineered the sessions) and Reggie Young.
The result is this collection of 14 toe-tapping songs which explore a hitherto neglected side of the potato-headed loon who gave us crunching alt-rock classics such as I Bleed and Where Is My Mind. And while there's nothing here to suggest that Black has suddenly found his true métier, this is a decent, listenable album: original songs such as Sing for Joy and Go Find Your Saint are warm and thrummy, while he makes a fair fist of old standards such as Dark End of the Street. Black's voice is rich and mellow, though not always entirely accurate, and there are some lovely guitar flourishes from Steve Cropper.
It's unlikely to trouble the charts for long, but this is more than a mere vanity project.
David Cheal
"Fried food, cigarettes, no exercise, chest pain..." (Excerpt from the Angina Monologues) |
Edited by - Ten Percenter on 07/17/2005 00:13:11 |
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Honeycomb review - Telegraph online
