Middle age can cause strange wheels to rotate in the rock star’s mind. Turning 50 persuaded David Bowie he could make a drum and bass album (he couldn’t); mid-life marked REM’s descent into formulaic dreariness and blue face-paint. For U2, artistic relevance has receded at roughly the same rate as The Edge’s hairline.
Frank Black, who at 40 ought be too young for such inanity, seems to lately have contracted a dose of pre-retirement daftness. How else to explain Honeycomb, in which the howling dervish of ‘80s indie-rock seeks reinvention as a mannered southern crooner?
Aghast perhaps at the unmitigated crassness of The Pixies reunion – glorious cabaret, but cabaret nonetheless – Black’s first solo album in a decade (his regular backing players The Catholics are on sabbatical) hungers for authenticity.
To this end, Black has recruited the sort of musicians for whom the Oh Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack – a project which conveyed an unlikely glamour upon a generation of mutton-chopped blue-grass loyalists – felt like a lottery win.
In the credits are listed such good ‘ol boys as Buddy Miller, Reggie Young and Spooner Oldham and for students of southern soul, Honeycomb will prove a mostly rewarding experiment. Black’s voice has acquired a whiskey-soaked tremble, as though he’s been gargling on woe every morning.
His guitar playing, too, comes down with a case of the mopes, segueing from steel-pedal twang to...well, a different kind of steel-pedal twang.
When the formula falls into a stride – and occasionally it does – Black’s country impulses make a crude sort of sense. He delivers ‘I Burn Today’ as a spirited lament; ‘Violet’ piles on gut-bucket melodies and honky-tonk rhythms.
Stretched over an entire album though, Black’s conceit – that ‘authenticity’ is merely a question of roping in some grizzled musicians and singing in an exaggerated croon – quickly frays at the edges. This summer’s Pixies tour can’t come soon enough.