Spring Album Roundup: From Naughty and Nice Rap to Willie Country

FRANK BLACK

“Frank Black”

4AD/Elektra

* * * 1/2

The erstwhile Pixies leader, having flip-flopped his old assumed name (Black Francis) for a new one, offers a solo debut that’s a darned good rock record and a fairly wonderful exercise in rock criticism.

With rock growing ever more fractured, Black offers a unifying vision. Hence, he’s able to couch a homage to the Ramones (“I Heard Ramona Sing”) in stately strains that echo the Electric Light Orchestra, the supposed antithesis of all that’s punk. Then, for his next move, he summons a common ancestral link between the two in a roaring but poppy version of Brian Wilson’s “Hang Onto Your Ego.”

That Beach Boys song serves as a thematic crux for an album that dwells (albeit in Black’s customary fragmented and oblique fashion) on rock’s mythology and its function as a source of ego-fortification and transcendence in an ego-battering, mundane world. Black himself displays a healthy ego in “Old Black Dawning,” which serves as an audio caption to the album’s rising sun cover art and seems to be a myth-making account of his own career arc. Black also knows that sometimes rock is best when it’s just dumb, crunchy and loud. “I’m a jerk, and it’s good,” he yowls at one point. It’s also good when he’s being smart.