Review Summary: Nonstoperotik is a solid addition to Frank Black's fluctuant repertoire.
Black Francis’ back catalogue is a supremely vast collection that currently stands at around sixteen albums, not to mention any work he penned with the Pixies. Simply, he’s a song writing machine, consistently delivering a new album’s worth of material effectively on an annual basis. However, on
Nonstoperotik, he’s here to convince us he’s a love machine. Unsurprisingly, given the album’s title, the record is about sex, and tries to confront it in a primarily affectionate way which is perhaps unexpected from a songwriter who previously wouldn’t touch the subject without some sort of ironic or depraved twist. The theme sits as a loose banner over the album generally, but it helps to focus the often preoccupied mind of Francis.
Things don’t begin well. ‘Lake of Sin’ is a languid opener with a chorus bereft of any interesting ideas like Francis’ music so often isn’t, instead utilising odd word annunciation and a vocal tick that he probably hoped would save it from becoming just a bland collection of chords. The walking-paced verses however demonstrate his more expert use of softer dynamics that continue to be the album’s forte. Synthesised strings in ‘O My Tidy Sum’ at first feel contrived, that is until the chorus where they rise out of anonymity and begin to soar in unity with Francis’ inimitably delicate falsetto. It must be tempting to develop such engaging song ideas and chord progressions into Pixies-styled-stompers, but Francis carefully exercises restraint here with electronic drums taking a backseat allowing the strings to take the lead.
On the whole, Francis resists the temptation to revel in Pixies-esque nostalgia, despite other critics feeling that he has stuck to what he knows and employed many tricks-of-the-trade he learnt whilst at the helm of the seminal band. ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ is in fact proof that he has actively tried to avoid such comparisons to his previous work, as the song, which incidentally has been knocking around since at least 2006 but been given the
Nonstoperotik treatment here, would have worked so much better if contorted into a quasi-Pixies song.
A couple of plodding numbers then follow. ‘Corrina’ and ‘Six Legged Man’ are standard Black Francis noise-attack fare characterised by persistently stabbed guitars and dissonant chords. It’s not until ‘When I Go Down On You’ that the album finally finds the groove it promised with the title and early string-backed ballads. The song itself is surprisingly tender, despite the unsavoury thought of Black Francis’ bald head going down on anyone, but Francis romanticises over the particular act with complete conviction. The track is the ideological foreplay to the succeeding title track, ‘Nonstoperotik’ where Francis intimates “I want to be inside / That is my intention / Inside of you / All the way.” The candid but well-intended lyrics are liberating to listen to, open and refreshingly squirm-free.
Francis then saves the best till last in the climax of his tender romp, with ‘Cinema Star’, which is spectacularly good. The rhythm section is tight, there’s some extra horn instrumentation for depth, and Francis’ story-telling is at it’s laconic and cryptic best. The tale is an odd one, where Francis finds a secret passage under his television that takes him to his local gym, where his lover is deep in conversation with another man. One line from the antagonist, the said ‘Cinema Star’ stands out: “I put my love into every part” which is perhaps a nod to the listener, and I for one believe that for all it’s faults, Black Francis truly crafted this little album with all his heart. Only the latter songs really show a true grasp of the sexual subject matter with the earlier tracks lacking focus and tact and the album therefore suffers cohesively. Perhaps
Intermittentlyerotik or
Stopstarterotik are more apt titles, but the thematic experiment is still a relative success and a welcome addition to the similarly fluctuant canon of Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV.
Written for www.nightbus.tumblr.com
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