Return of the Fat Man: Frank Black

In a late entry to the other week's tragicomedy we called "Greatest Album of All Time," I offer another incredibly soft-handed record for your consideration. Please cut me some slack on this one—I've been doing these regular updates almost completely alone for a week, and I'm getting a little tapped. Anyway, without further ado: Frank Black.

("Wait, is he really writing about the effing PIXIES?!?! So this is what projected embarrassment feels like...")

In 1993, about a month or so before Charles Thompson broke the news to the rest of the Pixies that the seven year trip was officially over (a move that his pocketbook has clearly come to regret), he began spending some time holed up in a studio with Pere Ubu-ite Eric Drew Feldman to work on a handful of new songs written to escape the trappings of the Pixies sound. Things were looking hopeful for the duo's efforts, so upon disbanding the Pixies, Thompson put the finishing touches on his new songs, and Frank Black (an inversion of his long time stage name Black Francis) was officially born—with the resulting album, despite all of his efforts to the contrary, sounding a whole heck of a lot like the Pixies.

Though consciously more structurally diverse than the bulk of the Pixies oeuvre, Black's self-titled debut is largely a reflection of his particular contribution to his celebrated band—acting as sort of a perfect counterpoint to the Breeders' pre-break-up Pod, that together define the two most distinct halves of the Pixies (sans a little Santiago for good measure). The record is largely a celebration of America's pop dynasty—besides songs written in specific tribute to the Ramones ("I Heard Romona Sing"), Iggy Pop ("Ten Percenter"), and featuring a cover of the Beach Boys' "Hang On To Your Ego"—the record touches on a multitude of American pop mainstays. But in spite of its intentional divergence from the Pixies throne, I've always largely considered this to be the final Pixies record—if only because its relative consistency has a lot more in common with that band's output then that of Frank Black's widely disappointing solo career.

Widely available at our nation's finer thrift stores and pawn shops (I bought my copy in perfect condition for the sum of $1.50), Frank Black is, admittedly, a little uneven—but in much the same tradition of previous GAoAT ponyexpressrecord, its high points shine just shy of his finest work. Frank Black is certainly not the Pixies, nor even necessarily on caliber with the best of the post-Pixies records (Kim Deal's output being in places arguably better than Jesus himself)—and surely a record that charts the first mile-marker on the downward curve of his lengthy creative plateau (what would quickly become Black's meteoric decline) could hardly stand in the annuls of pop history as a creative high-water mark. But look it up in a tattered, poorly bound reference book called GBoAT? It's the Greatest Album of All Time.