“What we want is extra foolish males,” declares Frank Black on “Two Reelers,” a salute to the Three Stooges that arrives about midway via Teenager of the Yr, the second album the previous Black Francis launched after disbanding the Pixies in 1993. His celebration of the idiocy of Larry, Curly, and Moe makes for an uncommon assertion of objective—a rallying name for alt-rockers to embrace the liberty of being ridiculous.
Silliness was in scarce provide when Black launched Teenager of the Yr in Could of 1994. Three years after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shot its manner into the Scorching 100, the choice rock explosion of the ’90s had acquired a decidedly dour aura, one cultivated by legions of lumbering grunge bands and tortured industrial outfits. The Pixies’ suave nightmares could have softened the bottom for the angst-ridden acts jostling for place on MTV’s 120 Minutes, however Black purposefully separated himself from the pack as soon as he launched his solo profession. He didn’t dangle with the flannel-clad hipsters; he aligned himself with the defiantly geeky They May Be Giants, the Brooklyn-based college-rock duo he known as his “favourite band” throughout the promotional push for Teenager of the Yr—a cycle that included a jaunt opening for TMBG within the fall of ’94.
The truth that he twice took a gap slot for a longtime act in ’94—within the spring, he went out with the Ramones—may very well be seen as proof of Black’s diminishing standing inside alt-rock circles, however Teenager of the Yr means that he took intentionally took himself out of the rat race. Teeming with tales of underwater empires and Los Angeles historical past classes, the album exists in its personal universe, a testomony to Black’s broad and various cultural obsessions. It’s additionally an album that might solely have been made within the mid-’90s, when the CD increase poured sufficient money into the music trade for a cult rocker like Black to ensconce himself in posh L.A. studios and indulge his each whim, leading to an album as prolonged as a double LP—certainly, the one bodily version of the thirtieth Anniversary reissue is a gold double-vinyl—however not structured just like the fastidiously sculpted gatefold classics of yore. As an alternative, its contours really feel dictated strictly by the capability of a compact disc: It sprawls till it all of the sudden stops, not as a result of it reached its vacation spot however as a result of it ran out of street.
Black scattered sharp, fastidiously sculpted songs all through the album. One in every of them, a buoyant piece of energy pop known as “Headache,” truly did make headway within the alt-rock mainstream; it spent 11 weeks on Billboard’s Fashionable Rock charts, a run that was longer than both “Los Angeles” or “Hold Onto Your Ego,” the 2 singles pulled from his eponymous 1993 solo debut. These punchy numbers are balanced by excursions into dreamy romanticism (“Speedy Marie,” “I May Keep Right here Ceaselessly”), invented Western epics (“Calistan”), and suites shrunken to dioramas (“Freedom Rock,” “Olé Mulholland”). Every of those longer items serves as guideposts in a file that provides a sequence of left turns because it swerves from revved-up rockabilly to clean lovers rock, with Black solely sometimes trying to mitigate the whiplash change of moods. He’s too wrapped up in following his counterintuitive muse to contemplate pandering to passive listeners.