Black Francis: Bluefinger : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

“Some people die, then they start to get old,” Black Francis yowls on Bluefinger, summing up the perversity of his youngest-sounding and most Pixies-ish solo album. For the first time since the Pixies, he's recording as Black Francis instead of Frank Black, writing songs in the choppy style of Trompe Le Monde. “Threshold Apprehension” is the best rock blowout he's come up with since “U-Mass,” yelping debased poetry (“I love a blue girl and I like my grog/It's a black-and-white world 'cause I'm a Scorpio dog”) over a staccato punk riff. He claims the album is inspired by the obscure Dutch art-rocker Herman Brood, yet sonically it's much closer to Kurt Cobain, whose Pixies fandom looms so large in the band's history -- Francis' vocals on “Captain Pasty” are blatantly Cobain-esque, as if that's part of his reconciliation with his past. On Bluefinger, it sounds like the Pixies' fantastic reunion shows have allowed Black to finally shed his ambivalence about rocking out. So he does.