Fast Man Raider Man
FRANK BLACK
Back Porch
I don't claim to know much about Frank Black's music — and I may know even less about The Pixies — but I know what I like, and I like this. It may come as old news to some of you, but Black is a first-rate Americana singer-songwriter who has the capacity to put together Fast Man Raider Man, a 27-song, two-CD set that clocks in at 95 minutes. This is no easy task, people, not without dragging the project down with filler and slapdash effort. Not every song on Fast Man Raider Man is a gem — there's actually even a dog or two — but Black shoots a very high percentage throughout.
He proves to be a deft music excavator. You can hear the influences, sometimes obvious, sometimes mere whiffs: Dylan, John Lennon, Van Morrison, the Stones, John Hiatt, Uncle Tupelo, Appalachia, New Orleans. In the way the elements are alchemically stirred together, the music here most resembles The Band.
Black doesn't sprinkle Pixie dust around by running it through a post-punk filter. This is gritty, authentic stuff, ranging from damn-near pure honky tonk to rough-hewn rockers to countrified R&B and several stripes of folk.
Black sings about the road, bad love, wayward friends, hard luck and heartbreak, but it's not so much the words as how he sings them. His chameleonic voice provides just the right flavor for each song, whether it's a creamy croon on the warm ballad "Golden Shore," the weary croak of the barroom lament "When the Paint Grows Darker Still," the vulnerable falsetto of "Fast Man" and "My Terrible Ways" or the jazzy swagger of "If Your Poison Gets You."
Fast Man Raider Man was cut in five sessions over two years — a couple of them hastily arranged, one-day marathons — under the aegis of veteran R&B producer John Tiven (who helmed Black's maiden Back Porch effort, Honeycomb). The album features work by a bevy of aces and legends: Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham, Levon Helm, Buddy Miller, Jim Keltner, Cheap Trick's Tom Petersson and several others. Perhaps the disc's most intriguing contributor is cult county singer Marty Brown, who brings a hefty dose of twang to Ewan McColl's honky tonk rave-up "Dirty Old Town."
The performances on Fast Man Raider Man have a loose, plug-in-and-play feel that lends the music a freshness and spontaneity that comes by throwing caution to the wind. (http://www.backporchrecords.com/">www.backporchrecords.com😉 4 stars
— Eric Snider
Just like the Fambly Cat
GRANDADDY
V2
This lauded Cali post-pop outfit's swan song opens with a couple of young girls asking what happened to the titular feline over a spare bed of electro-noise. If this intro is a shameless heartstring tug — and it is, evoking visions of a forgotten peripheral family member trundling off to die under a house somewhere — then the rest of the album is both a powerful last gasp and an alternately dreamy and sullen reminder of what we won't be getting from now on. All of Grandaddy's now-familiar sonic elements — multiple layers of guitar and synth fuzz, live drums blended with programmed rhythms, sophisticated hooks, singer-songwriter Jason Lytle's lazy falsetto — are firmly in place, and have rarely sounded better. 4 stars
— Scott Harrell
Decemberunderground
AFI
Interscope
Wildly popular veteran goth-punk act AFI's second major-label offering finds the band edging ever further away from the hardcore-influenced sound of its Nitro Records days. Decemberunderground consists largely of poetic, moody modern rock that draws heavily from both pop-punk and all the usual '80s artists associated with the current Old Wave resurgence. Shades of U2, Joy Division and Depeche Mode darken catchy tunes like "The Missing Frame" and "37 mm," while "Miss Murder" could've been lifted from Green Day's last disc, and "Love like Winter" and "The Killing Lights" strongly recall dark-punk contemporaries Alkaline Trio. Overall, this is a much more satisfying listen than '03's Sing The Sorrow, but the kind of hard-edged rock that marked the likes of '99's Black Sails in the Sunset is largely a thing of the past. 3 stars
— Sh
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.