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Here's the new music you'll hear this week. Click on the track to buy from our iTunes store.
The Raconteurs - Steady, As She Goes
Death Cab For Cutie - Crooked Teeth
Dashboard Confessional - Don't Wait
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Dani California
Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor

Entire playlist >>
   

Black on Blonde?
Pixies frontman Frank Black goes to Nashville and Newport
BY MATT ASHARE

The Pixies, as frontman Charles Thompson (a/k/a Black Francis/Frank Black) likes to point out, were never a commercial success. Sure, they were huge in England. Yes, they had a late MTV/radio hit with "Here Comes Your Man" right before snagging the opening slot on a U2 tour and then promptly breaking up. And as Kurt Cobain admitted on numerous occasions, the song that catalyzed the alt-rock revolution — "Smells like Teen Spirit" — was his attempt to write a Pixies song. That and a mortgage will buy you a decent place to call home. But nobody in the band got filthy rich during the Pixies’ first run, from ’87 to ’91. And for Thompson it only got worse: his first three solo albums for Elektra, 1993’s Frank Black, 1994’s Teenager of the Year, and 1996’s The Cult of Ray, sent him back to Indie Land while Pixies bassist Kim Deal scored an alt-rock hit ("Cannonball") and a Lollapalooza mainstage spot with her Breeders. Elektra didn’t even have much luck repackaging the Pixies for post-Nirvana mass consumption: the 1997 two-disc retrospective Death to the Pixies: 1987-1991 moved so few units that the label didn’t consider digging into the vaults again until word got out that the band were gearing up for a reunion.

That reunion began more than a year ago. And you can’t blame Thompson for feeling a sense of vindication. I saw the Pixies in May 2004 basking in the adoring glow of 40,000 or more fans who’d spent the day in the desert outside Palm Springs waiting to cheer and sing along to "Wave of Mutilation," "Bone Machine," and, of course, "Gouge Away." They’ve since been to Europe and back and zigzagged their way across the country, and if they didn’t quite sell out Boston University’s new Agganis Arena, they’ve still got festivals in Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and, of course, Reading and Leeds in Great Britain to look forward to in August. Oh, and next weekend, along with Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes, the Pixies will be one of the mainstage attractions hipping up this year’s Newport Folk Festival with an "acoustic" performance. In June, 1988’s Surfer Rosa, the band’s first full-length, was belatedly certified gold for half a million sales by the RIAA.

Thompson remains cautiously optimistic. Speaking from his home south of Portland in Oregon, he’s both circumspect and bemused: "I don’t know what to say . . . we have offers to go play shows. And we had an offer at some point to make a record from someone who offered us a stupid amount of money. But in general, record companies aren’t that zealous about the idea. They want to hear the product first. We have to generate some product first — a demo or something. And right now" — he laughs — "we’re too busy filling up our briefcases with cash."

And yet Thompson has taken the Pixies’ triumphant return as an opportunity to record and release a solo project he’s had in mind for the better part of a decade: a solo album of new material recorded in Nashville with a band of seasoned sessionmen. Honeycomb — he tends to pick names because he likes the way they sound — is being billed by Back Porch as his first solo album since The Cult of Ray. Well, yes, but since 1998, he’s released five domestic albums as Frank Black & the Catholics, and he’s been far from idle: last year’s Frank Black Francis two-disc set on spinART included a CD of Pixies demos and another full disc of Pixies tunes recorded with David Thomas’s Two Pale Boys backing band. Honeycomb, though, is a refreshing departure in that it places a quirky songwriter in the company of Music Row vets who earn their living making hit singles for big-name artists.

Thompson had his own reasons for wanting to do the Nashville thing. "I wanted to make a Nashville record like Blonde on Blonde, and I was finally in a space where I was able to do just that. As soon as I read about the making of Blonde on Blonde I knew I wanted to do this. I love that record. Just the image of Dylan scribbling down lyrics in his hotel room while the session cats sat around waiting for him. So we got together for four days and cut an album. I mean, the red light goes on and you’re recording a song. For those guys, it’s they first time they’ve ever heard the song. And for at least a third of the album, that’s the take that’s on the album. Maybe on one or two of them we played three times. But that was it. But there’s nothing hack about it either. Everything is with feeling. Those guys play so good. They listen so good. They never stomp on each other. They’re constantly paying attention to the lyric and echoing the sentiment of the lyric in ways that are surprising."

Honeycomb may not quite be Thompson’s Blonde on Blonde. And it’s not a country album in any traditional sense. He’s played around with country song forms going as far back as the Pixies. "I Burn Today" has a bit of a two-stepping groove and some nice clean country string bends; "Another Velvet Nightmare" is something of a gospel blues in its chordings. "Atom in My Heart," "Strange Goodbye" (an aptly named duet with Thompson’s ex-wife, Jean), and an amusing cover of the novelty tune "Song of the Shrimp" (popularized by Elvis in his film Girls, Girls, Girls) all have a country feel. At the same time, there’s a heavy Muscle Shoals R&B influence on Honeycomb that underscores the groove of the understated "Lone Child" and the more up-tempo "Go Find Your Saint," not to mention the Dan Penn classic "Dark End of the Street," which Thompson delivers with as much aching melancholy as he’s ever invested in a song. "Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day" is as pure pop as the unwieldy title suggests.

"The objective wasn’t to make country music," he explains. "There might be some countryish music on the album, but the idea was to make a rock record with some players who aren’t really rock players — guys who play quietly. Even more important than their chops is just their experience. It’s like when you see a young band go through a soundcheck and spend a long time paying attention to all of these particulars, like the sound of the hi-hat. But as the years go by, those particulars become less important. It becomes, ‘Let’s just play the songs.’ In the studio, people think they need all this stuff. These guys don’t need all that stuff. They don’t care about it. They just want to make music. Maybe it’s because later that day they have to work on their lawn or something, but whatever it is has forced them to tune into whatever they have to tune into in order to make the artist and the producer very happy."

Those players included guitarist Buddy Miller, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, and drummer Anton Fig. And among the engineers who worked the sessions was Dan Penn himself. "It just so happens that Dan Penn wrote ‘Dark End of the Street’ and I’d discovered a Gram Parsons version of the tune that I’d been driving around in my car listening to over and over again because it connected with me. And at least three of the guys in the band had played on a couple of classic versions of the tune. So when I brought it up, Dan came out and said, ‘Hit it boys.’ "

The timing of the release of Honeycomb has to raise questions about the future of the Pixies. Thompson admits he gets a kick out of having a new solo album out in the midst of all the excitement. But it doesn’t go any farther than that. "It did become in a fun sort of way like ‘Ha ha . . . see you guys . . . I’m busy . . I’m doin’ shit man.’ But I don’t want the Pixies to hear the record and go, ‘Ugh.’ I want them to be impressed by the songs because I want them to keep working with me."

The Pixies | Dunkin’ Donuts Newport Folk Festival | August 6 | Fort Adams State Park | 401.847.3700

 


Issue Date: July 29 - August 4, 2005
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