Black Francis

Black Francis
sv n f ng rs
(Cooking Vinyl)
The Black Francis moniker is so entwined with the Pixies, it is hard not to expect a certain brand of songs with its use. And on sv n f ng rs (the follow-up to last year's excellent Bluefinger) you get just that on "garbage heap" (which nods back to Bossanova) and "I sent away," a short, sharp and strange punky tune about the perils of mail-order shopping. But the other five tunes are all Frank Black-era songwriting, which was always distinguished by its clever quirkiness as opposed to the screaming, urgent necessity of The Pixies. On the plus side, this is as solid a batch of tunes as any Black Francis or Frank Black release in recent memory.
---Dave Hayden