A concept album about the beast with two backs mightn’t seem like a radical notion – after all, rock ‘n’ roll itself is named after the conjugal act. But as both Doctor Ruth and the Stooges might attest, there are a million variations on the set lexicon of moves, some as painful as they are pleasurable.
The twist with Nonstoperotik, Frank Black’s eighteenth (eighteenth!) solo album is that it was partially recorded in a haunted studio in London. Blood-sugar-sex-magick, the erotic meets the esoteric. This record, Black says, was inspired by the abstract, neo-psychedelic nature of the pubescent’s first encounter with the sensual world. So yes, there are bulging and muscular tunes like the opener ‘Lake of Sin’, or the Mo Tucker motorik and Reedy guitar break of the Burrito Brothers’ ‘Wheels’, but there are also strange, candle-lit moments: the hazy neo-surf of ‘O My Tidy Sum’; the medieval English folk of ‘Rabbits’; the Spector big band majesty of ‘When I Go Down On You’, which might as well be about a ketamine hole as fond recollections of teenage head.
Then there are songs as simple and visceral as ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ and ‘Corrina’, intentionally referential, suggesting that all you need is a girthsome growl, a dose of rhythm-heavy rifferama, some Doorsy piano, and a bit of a tune in order to attain the transcendental. This is rock ‘n’ roll boiled down to its joyous ‘96 Tears’/’Gloria’/’Waiting For the Man’ essence. Nonstoperotik pulls off the neat trick of exploding the form’s possibilities while celebrating its primitivist impulses. Here, Black comes close to a sort of savant genius.