There are two kinds of Black Francis fans: the smallish cult who’ve followed his every whim and U-turn since disbanding the Pixies and morphing into Frank Black, and the ones who stopped listening after the release of the Pixies’ 1991 finale, Trompe Le Monde, only to return to the fold when Francis reformed the band in 2004 to tour. Bluefinger is the former Charles Thompson IV’s first solo album under the Pixies-era Black Francis moniker. Ostensibly, it’s a signal that he’s back in “rock” mode after more than a decade of stylistic and qualitative wandering. While it’s certainly no Doolittle, Bluefinger is the most intriguing set of new songs he’s released in the ’00s. Like much of Francis’ most compelling work, the album is a meditation on a muse. In the past, such inspiration was provided by Francis’ fixations with Puerto Rico, UFOs and/or the Three Stooges, but here it takes the shape of Dutch musician/multimedia artist Herman Brood, a proto-punk whose influential solo work in the ’70s and ’80s and hard-partying lifestyle made him Holland’s equivalent of Johnny Thunders. (Brood took his own life by leaping from an Amsterdam hotel room in 2001.) Bluefinger thrashes along nicely in service of pseudo-biography that details Brood’s unapologetic junk worship (“Captain Pasty,” “Tight Black Rubber”), his metaphysical wrestling with life beyond this planet (“Threshold Apprehension,” “Angels Come To Comfort You”) and even a cover of one of Brood’s songs (a Sonic Youth-like reading of “You Can’t Break A Heart And Have It”). Hell, now that he’s seen fit to don the Black hat again, can a proper Pixies reunion album be far behind? [www.cookingvinylusa.com]
—Corey duBrowa
