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Album reviews Music

FRANK BLACK

FRANK BLACK & the Catholics Black Letter Days (Sonic Unyon) Rating: NNNN Devil’s Workshop (Sonic Unyon) Rating: NNN Rating: NNNN


College rock’s shadowy sweetheart, Frank Black, returns with an exhaustive double-album assault of songs. Devil’s Workshop bears the most obvious hallmarks of the Pixies mainman, who had countless post-punk hipsters bobbing their heads to Here Comes Your Man. Although Black maintains his flair for the lyrically cryptic, the songs are mostly straightforward and fairly innocuous upbeat guitar-driven pop. Black Letter Days is the more interesting album, a measured and varied twang-infused road-trip diary framed by two great takes on Tom Waits’s The Black Rider. Weirdly enough, the cabaret swing of the opening track recalls the Muppet Show theme song, and Black tempers his trademark snarl on the second version, tossing off a muttered William Shatner-like monologue over an organ-backed shuffle. Pedal steel figures prominently, as do wistful, solipsistic lyrical musings, but Black Letter Days has its bubbly moments as well — 21 Reasons could be an early-90s Lowest of the Low hit. Frank Black & the Catholics make a stand at the Horseshoe Tuesday through Saturday (October 29 to November 2). SARAH LISS

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