Black Francis – NonStopErotik

Black Francis will be no stranger to any listener with even a passing interest in, or knowledge of alternative music from the last 20 or so years. As Pixies frontman he unquestionably blazed a trail for weird, disorientating, troubling yet hugely listenable alt.rock and his on-off solo career has done nothing since then to discredit his legacy.This is something like his eighteenth solo album, so the first thing that is notable, if not a little remarkable, is its freshness and Francis’ continued ability to produce imagery and ideas that resonate. Religious references abound, as you might expect ”“ from the opening track’s ‘Lake Of Sin’, to the “falling into grace” on ‘O My Tidy Sum’, and the reading of scriptures in ‘Wild Son’. The Flying Burrito Brothers song ‘Wheels’ also has a religious aspect: “I’ll turn to him, who makes my faith so strong”, sings Francis, in his amicable, pleasant-enough if slightly unexceptional cover version.Secrets and mysteries are entertainingly hinted at in ‘Lake Of Sin’ (where there is “a secret knock / At my door”) and ‘Cinema Star’ ”“ a strange story (is it a dream?) where the narrator finds a secret door underneath his TV and follows it down to a long dark tunnel, eventually emerging at his local gym where he finds his loved one in conversation with another man. The implied jealousy here is just one of several slightly angsty or anguished moments on the album. Others include the air of wistful regret on ‘O My Tidy Sum’ and the banishment “up on the mountain / With nothing to eat” in ‘Dead Man’s Curve’.It would be easy to be misled by the title into thinking that the other prevailing theme to be found on the record would be of raunch, smut and sexuality. Much more interestingly, and touchingly, though, this is clearly an album more strongly rooted in love than lust, with the latter featuring mainly as a side-product and consequence of the strength of the former. Many of the songs are quite obviously written with a real person in mind, the “she” of ‘O Tidy Sum’ who “gives the orders” and “feels the weight of this twisted arrangement”; the woman to whom he clearly addresses lines like “I hope you know my love was true” in the simple yet slightly skewed ballad ‘Rabbits’. Erotica does, of course, appear, most notably in two of the album’s finest tracks ‘When I Go Down On You’ and ‘NonStopErotik’. Even (especially?) here, though, the sexuality and desire is part and parcel of the love and affection, rather than as something that stands apart. The first of these two is a flowery, romantic ballad, eulogizing the joys of performing oral sex, where performing cunnilingus is seen as a cure for all of life’s woes. “Baby, please, I know that I’ll get through / When I go down on you” he pleads, adorably, or ”“ even more soul-baringly -  “I don’t need to have some money and I don’t need to have some friends / I don’t need to have somebody new / When I go down on you” and “With you all things I will transcend”. All this - accompanied by piano and violins that are positively syrupy in places ”“ makes for a swoonsome album standout.‘NonStopErotik’, immediately following, is almost like an (emotional and sexual) continuation. The mood is still flowery and romantic, but now Francis wants to “be inside, that’s my intention / Inside of you”. Seems only fair. This track is also great, and only slightly marred by the guitar break’s similarity to Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’.The overall sound is quite serious and fairly AOR, in fact, particularly on ‘Lake Of Sin’, ‘Wheels’ and ‘Dead Man’s Curve’; while ‘Corrina’ and ‘Six Legged Man’ are straight-up exuberant rock ‘n’ rollers. Echoes of Pixies can be heard in the falsetto deployed on ‘O My Tidy Sum’, and the whoops, yelps and barks towards the end of ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ (although the vocal sounds more like Bruce Springsteen for the majority of this track).This, then is a worthy and very listenable addition to the Black Francis / Frank Black / Charles Thompson canon. A slightly off-centre, messed-up yet ultimately hugely moving and genuinely felt and expressed love letter of an album, it is music to bring gladness to the heart and soul as much as to any baser of the body’s regions”¦