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Not so much fastman or raiderman, this is really the culmination of Charles Thompson's journeyman incarnation. Don't necessarily take that as a slight - Frank Black after all is not the nom de guerre of someone with too many pretensions. And what's wrong with a simple aspiration to being a fine sleeves-rolled-up songwriter? Black's efforts of late have been nothing if not Stakhanovite. If memory serves he's been averaging more than an album a year for quite a while. This double CD effort is aimed squarely at writing a great rock songbook, and with this in mind he surrounded himself with a cast of 60s and 70s instrumental luminaries.
He's successful too. While there's shades of all manner of others in here, from Tom Waits to Roxy Music - and if Van Morrison had really written anything as good as a number of the songs here in much of the later part of his career it would have been hailed as one of his periodic returns to form - Frank Black has his own laid back troubadour voice which charms and entertains. The problem of course is that, for all that, he pushes none of the 'surprise' and 'exhilaration' buttons that made his Pixies acolytes fall for his work in the first place. But, reunion tours notwithstanding, that was then and this is now. Exhilaration might not be the name of the game, but a bit of skill with a tune, a lot of heart and a gentle sense of humour - viz I'm not Dead (I'm in Pittsburgh) - go an awful long way.
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