[music] FRANK BLACK FRANCIS - Frank Black Francis (Spinart)

Frank Black (formerly Black Francis) has made a lot of albums since the Pixies broke up, most of them mediocre. He needs a solo best-of so badly that I just assumed that's what this was when I saw its title on the release schedule. I was completely wrong.

The first disc is a half-hour recording made the day before the Pixies recorded Come On Pilgrim; Black Francis went over to the producer's house to play the songs on his acoustic guitar as "audio notes" for the studio session. They're largely amazing, and for some reason the asides ("And then here's where the bass would go...") don't break the solidity of the performances. More than with most demos, demystifying the songs doesn't make them less, uh, mysterious. I hadn't realized before how much Francis's early vocals resembled Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes.

The second disc: Pixies songs re-recorded with the Two Pale Boys last year. Black worries in the liner notes that they're travesties. The music, at least, is respectable; it sounds like a less-artificial Residents, not like Black's tepid solo albums. But some tracks work (a little) and some don't at all, for two reasons... first, the meditative mood of these re-recordings has limited overlap with the songs' emotional tone. I once ate a fudge brownie with guacamole on top to see what it would taste like, and you know, it didn't ruin either flavor as such, but it wasn't good either, and in retrospect it's hard to see what I thought, at best, was going to happen. So there's that.

The second problem is that Frank Black sings some of his old songs like a kid who's bored senseless with the Pledge of Allegiance but doesn't want to get in trouble by changing the words. He speeds up, or hangs on to a syllable for an extra fraction of a second, or changes inflections without creating a coherent new reading of the line. The songs where he does that, I can't listen to at all. The others... probably worth hearing twice, and that's it.

[music] WILLIAM SHATNER - Has Been (Shout! Factory)

Well...

Shatner and Ben Folds make a good match. Nobody handles the sincerity/insincerity slalom like Folds (even, in this case, with his role reduced to that of wordless arranger/musician), and Shatner's vocal mannerisms are at least rarely boring.

That only means this record isn't a laughingstock, though. Once the novelty of it not being a preposterous disaster wears off, you have to decide how much you care about Shatner's philosophy of life and flights of fancy. He's most intriguing when he pushes his luck and attacks topics you'd think would sink him, like on "What Have You Done" (a hushed poem about finding his wife dead, which actually happened to him) and "Has Been" (which at its core boils down to the adolescent rejoinder "oh yeah? I bet you can't do any better!") but in the end, none of this is impressive or exciting. It's interesting, but maybe only because the rest of the world is not as interesting as it should be.