Black shakes up classic western rock with Dog
By JOE REISING
Scene Music Critic
It is usually never a good sign when a band puts their picture on the album cover. Case in point, every Britney Spears/ Backstreet boys/ N'Sync record ever made. A band's picture usually signifies that the music is not good enough to stand alone and the record companies need to market band members' faces to sell the album.
Fortunately, Frank Black does not have a pretty face, and he and his band, the Catholics, are definitely not hashing out flavor-of-the-year sound to hungry teenage consumers.
In fact, Dog in the Sand reaches about as far back into rock and western roots as any band can reasonably go. As Frank Black explains on the W.A.R. Records Web site, the album was recorded live onto two tracks — meaning no studio overdubs or even edits. Black, hopefully joking, foresees a time when the band will record on wax cylinder, and then, perhaps a release just on sheet music.
It may seem strange for Frank Black to be embracing such a time-worn rock sound. As the former lead singer of the Pixies in the late 80s and early 90s, Frank Black and friends laid most of the groundwork for 90s rock music with their early use of start-stop song dynamics and general knack for finding fresh ways around regular rock formulas.
No such groundbreaking sounds are to be found on Dog in the Sand.
On a recent tour, Black said that the band listened to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street every morning, and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde every afternoon, which gives a pretty good idea of Dog in the Sand's overall sound.
One can easily picture half the songs from the album pouring out of the jukebox in some smoky barroom on the edge of the desert. The use of the pedal steel guitar throughout the album, an instrument responsible for much of that 50s western sound, definitely helps create the effect.
But Dog in the Sand is much more than a rock revival. It is also a Frank Black album, and as such, carries with it Black's penchant for always doing something different — both as a singer and lyricist.
"Blast Off," the album's opener, begins with Black singing in a shaky goth voice over slow chords but then quickly breaks into rowdy rocking beat with pounding honky tonk piano courtesy of former Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu member Eric Drew Feldman.
Black's off-the-wall lyrics show up throughout the song, with lines like, "I'm in a Beckett trance/ from all the chemicals/ and when we get there/ the Irish in me is gonna claim it for France." Not too many roadhouse rock songs can claim to reference existentialist playwrights, or spout off lines like, "Union pour la promotion de la propulsion photonique." It is that kind of eccentricity that makes an otherwise good old-fashioned rock song a little more fresh and challenging.
On "Bullet," Black has fun with the traditional minor chord stomp of the song, singing, "If you don't like my melody/ I'll sing it in a major key/ I'll sing it very happily." The Catholics pull off all the western genres on the album expertly, but it is reassuring to know at the same time that they aren't taking themselves too seriously.
Occasionally though, songs like the slow sprawling ballad "I'll Be Blue" or the electric piano lament "I've Seen Your Picture" drag down the pace a little bit. But even these songs are done well and add a few more moods and details to the album's sepia toned view of the western horizon.
Frank Black is not going to inspire any future Nirvanas with Dog in the Sand. But he does do an excellent job re-imagining the western roots of old time rock 'n' roll, while still throwing in plenty of his inventive oddness at the same time.
Dog in the Sand is an album worth buying, both to hear phrases like "In division pelagic you were choragic" and simply to hear some great rock tunes. With this album, Frank Black and the Catholics relive a vintage sound sadly forgotten amid the stacks of discs with pretty faces and not an ounce of inspiration.
All Scene Stories for Tuesday, February 20, 2001
