Black Letter Days

Devil’s Workshop Back when he was fronting the Pixies, it seemed that Frank Black’s songs were just a tad too weird for the masses to get their heads around. Since disbanding the seminal post-punk group, though, the eccentricities have mostly dropped out of Black’s songwriting, and the result is what we have here: nearly 30 songs, most of which are pretty solid pop’n’roll, but few of which really stick in your craw the way the Pixies’ more oddball romps did. Black Letter Days is the more ambitious of these two collections, getting off to a banging start with a rollicking cover of Tom Waits’s “Black Rider,” the howling “California Bound,” and a wonderfully loping alt-country shuffle called “Chip Away Boy.” The rest of the album’s 18 tracks are more hit than miss and while the percentages remain about the same for Devil’s Workshop, the sheer volume of material here seems a bit like overkill and can’t help but contribute to the records’ disposable feel. Less, in this case, would really have been more.