Hide Review
Here is the info file from Indietorrents.
Artist.......: Black Francis
Album........: SVN Fngrs
Label........: Cooking Vinyl
Genre........: Indie
Catnr........: n/a
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Feb-29-2008
str.date.....: Mar-03-2008
quality......: VBR/44.1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: n/a
track title time
01. The seus 03:42
02. Garbage heap 02:50
03. Half man 02:33
04. I sent away 02:04
05. seven fingers 01:47
06. the tale of lonesome fetter 03:57
07. When they come to murder me 03:24
Runtime 20:17 min
Size 30,5 MB
Release Notes:
Legendary Pixies frontman still cranking out
surrealist alt-rock gems.
Good old Black Francis ñ he's not a man to grow old
gracefully like the mainstream musos. Sure, he may
have made some significant excursions into
Americana and folk sounds under his ìrealî name,
Frank Black. But when he wears the Black Francis
hat, he's still the darkly inventive surrealist who
led alt-rock legends Pixies to become one of the
most influential bands of the late eighties. No
meandering radio-friendly balladeering about
cornfields and half-formulated regrets here, no
sir.
Instead, Svn Fngrs ñ seven songs in twenty minutes,
mostly made up from simple jangling punky chords on
guitar and sparse rat-a-tat drumming. The focus is
all on Black Francis' voice: muttering, ranting,
screeching, doing child-like falsettos, sounding
like a stoned night-watchman or a schizophrenic
cowboy or a drunken Elvis impersonator or ... or
all sorts of things, really. Sometimes all within
the space of a line or two, in fact.
And what lines they are. Black Francis songs are
always narratives ñ little vignettes and character
sketches, miniature stories of strange people doing
normal things or normal people doing strange
things. More than half the fun is trying to work
out what they're really about.
Listening to Black Francis is like listening to a
quick-change impressionist who only does imitations
of real small-town characters that you've never met
before (and never will). It's kind of like a
road-movie, but made of music. And with a plot
written by David Lynch in an unusually carefree and
silly mood. Sort of.
That's the thing ñ much like Pixies, Black Francis
is too big for the usual boxes, and the only one
you can fit him in comfortably is the custom-made
one with his own name written on it. He's a quirky
genius with a distinctive style, and Svn Fngrs is a
glimpse into the sideshow circus of his mind ñ
simultaneously fun and disturbing, and as
compelling as a couple arguing about their
sex-lives in a crowded restaurant.
A couple of months ago, the ever-reliable Cooking Vinyl sent Frank Black aka Black Francis aka one of the most prolific songwriters of the last howevermanyyearsitisnow into the studio to record a B-side. He came back with a seven-track mini-album, written, recorded and mixed in under a week. Let’s be honest – considering he’s released, on average, over an album a year for the last eight years, surely they should’ve expected this? And anyway, when someone’s as outrageously talented as Frank is, belching out quality songs seemingly at will, it’s hardly a bad thing, is it?
Lasting only slightly longer than 20 minutes, Svn Fngrs is a joyously lo-fi collection of songs which proves that even his most unrefined efforts have nuggets of purest genius in them. The closer, ‘When They Come To Murder Me’ is a throbbing beast of Americana, all relentless driving drums and a chorus that, although it never hangs around for long enough to get boring. “I was born in a double orgasm,” he grunts, as if to affirm his status as a permanent outsider almost from birth. And, while he’s obviously never fitted flush with any so-called traditional ideas of what is and isn’t pop/rock star, the point is that Black’s still around and still making music better than most of the young bucks out there. It’s a joyous celebration of the fact that he’s been a step ahead of the pack probably since the inception of That Other Band – “When they come to murder me / I’m already gone, bye-bye,” he drawls. Sorry chaps, you won’t catch him.
There’s still the air of wilful pissing about, too. ‘I Sent Away’ is about the joys of, er, mail order set to a punk structure so rickety it feels like the song could fall apart at any moment. But when it doesn’t – and the playful harmonica contributes to the sense that Black’s just bashing away at his guitar and making up lyrics on the spot – there’s no sense of disappointment at all. Clocking in at just over two minutes it’s over before it’s even begun, feeding into the cheeky stomp of ‘Seven Fingers’, which is built around a melody so irresistible it should be added to broccoli to make the fat kids of England lose some weight. The overriding feeling is that Svn Fngrs could have been refined, tweaked and buffed into something that it’s not meant to be, and is all the stronger for the blind alleys and the apparently-random procession of ideas that Black chucks about. Need further proof? Check out the opener ‘The Seus’, which is as blatant a piss-about as you could possibly hope to find. It sounds like he’s trying to filter some purposely oblique lyrics through a call-and-response verse and deliberately messy guitar like he’s attempting to write the most half-arsed rap song ever conceived. And yet its character and charm remain undimmed, like he’s letting you in on some private joke or allowing the world to sit in on his demo sessions which, let’s face it, is what this album basically is.
It might seem annoying and a touch indulgent, but Frank Black hasn’t earned the right to have his record label release pretty much everything he wants because ‘he’s Frank Black’; they release it because he seems to be almost incapable of putting out music that’s devoid of merit. And while Svn Fngrs isn’t a lost masterpiece it pulls its coherence directly from its inspired madness, which immediately makes it worth investigating.
7/10
- www.drownedinsound.com