Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, the latest offering from Frank Black, aka Black Francis, grew out of sessions for a digital b-side and was written, recorded and mixed in just six days. It’s a tribute to the former Pixies frontman’s finely honed songwriting talents that this hastily created record is such an accomplished affair.
Svn Fngrs is the most sonically abrasive album Black has produced in a while, dominated as it is by clattering rhythms and spiky guitars, with occasional bluesy harmonica fills courtesy of the singer himself. However, Black’s melodic instincts are as sharp as ever and more than compensate for the unpolished production. Indeed, the choral chants and sweetly harmonious interludes of opener ‘The Seus’ are an immediate reminder of his remarkable creative gifts.
Though stopping short of explaining the overall concept, Black says that the lyrical preoccupations of Svn Fngrs are “a lot of NASTY sex, NASTIER death, and beautifully strange birth”. The usual, in other words. Perhaps my favourite track is ‘Half Man’, an irresistibly catchy rocker wherein Black states, “Don’t blame me because, hey, I’m only human”.
In Pulp Fiction, Marsellus Wallace laments that his business is “filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine”. Luckily for us, nearly quarter-of-a-century after The Pixies’ formation, Black – to borrow Will Self’s appraisal of JG Ballard – continues to disorientate, derange and knock the work of his contemporaries into a hatted cock.