Music
By Edd Hurt
As they mature, or at least get older, many ambitious pop musicians forsake the overloaded song forms of their youth for something simpler and more direct. Love’s Arthur Lee, on 1967’s Da Capo and Forever Changes, combined creepy easy-listening orchestrations and garage-band dynamics to X-ray the haze that threatened to envelop the Los Angeles inside his head. But after breaking up the original Love, Lee reinvented himself as a vaguely left-of-center R&B musician, apparently not realizing that his talent for synthesizing Mick Jagger and Johnny Mathis, with a string section, was what made him compelling in the first place.
Other artists figure the best way to get back to their roots is to head down South. Elvis Costello’s Nashville album Almost Blue mostly proved he was more convincing conflating Abba and Harold Arlen, or making the drunken Stax pastiche of his dreams, than covering Gram Parsons and Hank Williams. Sometimes, though, musicians known for complexity do well feigning naturalness in Nashville, as did the Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Bob Dylan on Nashville Skyline. (Moby Grape’s Skip Spence simply ignored convention on his one-man-band Nashville album Oar, a triumph of simplicity that managed to sound just as weird as his earlier work.)
Former Pixies frontman Frank Black is another ambitious pop artist who has chosen to record in Nashville. The result, Honeycomb, could be described as his roots move, or as his Blonde on Blonde homage; the record features the first-rate playing of musicians Steve Cropper, Reggie Young, David Hood and Spooner Oldham, who among them have played on some of the greatest recordings ever made in the South. But despite their participation, and that of legendary producer and songwriter Dan Penn, Honeycomb is a singer-songwriter record in Americana drag, and as such reveals the perils of an essentially synthetic artist’s attempt to abjure the formal innovations of his past.
Black’s post-Pixies efforts are the work of a flaneur and bricoleur whose main talent is for compressing familiar forms. He’s ingenious at constructing riffs and delights in composing songs with measures of 6/4 and 3/4 that keep the listener off-balance. While inconsistent, and willfully lightweight, his oeuvre includes one classic, 1994’s Teenager of the Year, and many fine songs, including Pistolero’s “So. Bay” and Frank Black’s “I Heard Ramona Sing,” which is like the work of a postmodern Arthur Lee who can convincingly utter the line, “They pull another Menudo.” And Black has shown interesting taste in covers, essaying Brian Wilson’s “Hang Onto Your Ego,” Del Shannon’s “Sister Isabelle,” Roxy Music’s “Re-make/Re-model” and The Kinks’ “This Is Where I Belong.”
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On Honeycomb, Black shows similar savvy in selecting outside material. He does well by Doug Sahm’s blithe “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day.” His take on “Song of the Shrimp,” a ridiculous yet charming number from Elvis Presley’s Girls! Girls! Girls!, is as ridiculous and charming as the original and showcases Black’s talent for recasting—he subtly alters the tune’s flavor by changing major chords to minor. Where he goes wrong is on his version of the classic soul ballad “The Dark End of the Street,” which isn’t likely to make listeners forget James Carr or the Flying Burrito Brothers, despite Cropper’s beautifully understated accompaniment. Black gets points for audacity, but he’s simply not a distinctive enough singer to pull it off.
As a divorce album (Black recently split up with his wife, who duets with him on “Strange Goodbye”), Honeycomb isn’t in the class of, say, Marvin Gaye’s 1978 Here, My Dear. Lines like, “Funny how an evening turns into years / Funny how we’re laughing through all these tears,” fall flat in their directness when compared to Gaye’s supremely evasive, “Somebody tell me please / Why do I have to pay attorney fees?”
While Black relies on songwriting and tasty arrangements, Gaye on Here, My Dear simply disregarded form (and sense), achieving a total sound that conveys more than a well-made song ever could—which is exactly what Black has done so well on many of his past records. It’s almost as if the autobiographical impulse has hobbled Frank Black. “My Life Is in Storage,” which has as its pretext his recent move from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., smacks of therapeutic poesy when he sings, “I had a castle / I had no hassles / Now tears are tassels.”
As songwriting, Honeycomb has its moments. The title track opens with a beautifully conceived and played instrumental passage that seems to encapsulate the impossibility of retrieving some bit of past happiness. It’s a fine example of Black’s ability to combine simplicity and surrealism, and contains some of his best lyrics: “The old churchyard is where I faded / She watched me while I fell unaided.” And “Selkie Bride,” which continues Black’s tradition of place-name songs like “Los Angeles” and “Pan-American Highway” by referencing a town called “Crescent City,” does achieve some kind of idiosyncratic country-soul vibe.
So, a pretty good singer-songwriter album for our time, and for all its obvious sincerity and skill, curiously uninvolving. Jon Tiven’s production is serviceable, and there are times when you start to think that Reggie Young’s beautifully rounded guitar solo on “My Life Is in Storage” is worth the rest of Honeycomb. The playing is at once distinctive and somehow characterless; studio rock has always benefited from the energy and eccentricity of a John Cale or Jack Nitzsche or, for that matter, of an Arthur Lee or Frank Black.
Or Jack Clement, with whom Black has worked on yet another Nashville album. Tentatively entitled The Sicilian—Black says he’s put lyrics to a section of French composer Gabriel Fauré’s 1898 Sicilienne—it was recorded at Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel after the Honeycomb sessions and features Levon Helm and Cheap Trick’s Tom Petersson, among others. There’s no release date yet, but it should be interesting. If anybody can bring out Frank Black’s eccentricity, it’s Cowboy Jack.