The set offers a chance to, for some, discover, and many rediscover and appreciate it all once again, warts an’ all, hits an’ misses. Half a year on from the extensive 9-CD box set 07-11, covering his solo albums, Frank Black has headed back further into his own history with another set that screams out for the completist’s dream.
Completely gone was the twisted absurdism in his lyrics as he laid bare something more scarred and personal, the end of one hell of a journey, or at least another stage. For completists too, these are the gems of the box set, the three released here on vinyl for the first time.Īnd that of course leaves just Show Me Your Tears before the decision was made to return to his first home and reform the Pixies. Show me a double album/release that wouldn’t benefit from a good trimming, but the run of three albums from Dog In The Sand to Devil’s Workshop was no doubt the strongest of his Catholics’ work and if anyone at that moment had earnt the right to put out what they damn well pleased, it was Black. Would it have made for a stronger release to cut the two down to one album and really bring out the highlights, which are plenty? Of course.
The former continued with that early 70’s influence of its predecessor, the album title continuing the religious fixation that comes out in his work, while the second hinted back to his past more. It aligned him closer to bands like Giant Sand and marked a change that he continued to mine over the rest of his Catholics’ albums.Īs often happens when an artist hits a certain point in their career, the inevitable double album emerges, of sorts – the simultaneous release of Black Letter Days and Devil’s Workshop. That said, Pistolero started to kick his new era up a notch and 2001’s Dog In The Sand saw him seemingly take a more conscious shift away from his previous sound and rolling back further in time to hole up with Richards and Jagger in Nellcôte. It’s tough to hang up the six-string on one of the most influential bands of a movement only to pick it up once again to try to move into something else, not altogether new, yet neither hitting the same essence of the dynamic of what came before. It was a solid album and laid the path to well to follow-up Pistolero.
Freed from the shackles of the Pixies, but yet clearly still writing in the same mould, albeit without the twisted quirkiness that made the Pixies truly special. The album showed Black in a kind of state of flux though, seemingly not always sure of where to go. The first full self-titled album was, as with all Catholics’ recordings, put down live straight to a two-track tape, resulting in that saturated and crunchingly raw sound, but was also the first album by a major artist to be released via the Internet. Frank Black, moving forward with the Pixies, returns once again to his past with a multiple-LP box set release of all the studio albums with The Catholics.įrom the outset of his years with The Catholics as his backing band, Frank Black had a foot in both the past and the future, straddling the chasm between the old and new in his music.