The Cult Of Ray

I could never figure out why so many scribes creamed themselves over the Pixies. To me they were mediocrity incarnate, musically limited and hardly bursting at the seams with lyrical wisdom. But this isn't the Pixies, this is a Frank Black solo album, and I approached it with a totally open mind, only to quickly have the door slammed shut again.

For me, the central flaw is the total absence of catchy melodies. He can't sing and he never could. The guitars are extremely basic (minimalist, he'd probably call it). The drumming is straightforward thump-thump. With the exception of the two instrumentals, every single one of the songs revolves around its title; this is to say, Black strives to repeat the title lyric as many times as possible, adds lashings of ultra-pedestrian hard rock guitar, and builds an entire song around it. Eleven times.

With about an hour maximum to review a tape I'd never heard before, and desperate to save time, I zapped 'I Don't Want To Hurt You' (the last song on side one); surmising that I wasn't going to miss much, and flipped it over. This meant that I also missed 'Mosh Don't Pass The Guy'; so for all I know, they could both be absolute gems, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Obviously, my analysis isn't as complete as it would otherwise be, so it's only fair to let Black inform his fans what the songs are about: "geographic obsession, conspiratorial paranoia, genetic alterations, lonely youth, universal violence, monsters, the pit and Shazab Andleeb." Uh, right, I understand, I think.

The highlight was the rhapsodic, peaceful trance-like silence that magically descended on my city-centre bachelor penthouse when the tape finished, earlier than I'd expected. As I write, all is now calm, save for the noise of traffic outside and the technotechnotechno thump emanating from the punters upstairs, obviously still partying like lunatics at one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Now, that was worth waiting for.