As the frontman of the now-defunct Pixies, he was Black Francis. But for his first solo foray, he's calling himself Frank Black. He was born Charles Michael Kitridge Thompson IV. Changing a given name is a classic rock & roll maneuver: Iggy Pop was once James Newell Osterberg, and Bowie was born David Robert Jones. An assumed name can be liberating from personal history and from social convention. For Black, the new alias frees him not only from early self-consciousness but from his own profitable and revered band.

Frank Black doesn't sound like a Pixies album, which is to Black's credit. It's funnier, more musically whimsical and varied, looser in spirit. The idea – originally to do covers – came about during recording sessions for the Pixies' last album, Trompe le Monde. Turns out there's only one cover, a charging reinterpretation of the Beach Boys' "Hang On to Your Ego." The rest of the fifteen songs range from a throwaway ditty ("Two Spaces," on which Black sings preciously, like an English dandy, instead of in his trademark irritated howl) to a punk's longing for "Los Angeles" ("not the one in Southern California" but the city pronounced differently, with a hard g, a generation ago) and an amusing ode to the Ramones ("I Heard Ramona Sing"). Not metaphorical like the Chills' "Leather Jacket," the song is just as revelatory: "I had so many problems/And then I got a Walkman.... They walked right in and they solved them."

With the Pixies, Black Francis took his fascinations (movies, TV, human misbehavior) and perverted them with a dark sensibility and noise. He's a kind of stout, ironic weirdo who in concert often can't mask his contempt for the crowd and who once said that the only reason he gets out of bed every day is for breakfast. On this album, whether he's singing happily about letting a beard grow out ("Fu Manchu") or putting the story of a half-Norwegian, half-Mexican man searching for a home ("Brackish Boy") into a folk-punk style, it sounds like Frank Black's having a good time. (RS 653)

CHRISTIAN WRIGHT