So I’ve been listening to Fast Man Raider Man quite a bit since it came out, but I’ve been pretty quiet about it, here, on the forums, on my own personal blogs. It isn’t that I don’t like the record–because I like it a lot–but so far it hasn’t crystalized into anything I can write. So I don’t know what else to do but talk about, maybe, a handful of the songs that I like best so far.

In The Time Of My Ruin starts off disc 2, and it’s almost as if someone had asked me to describe a Frank Black song and then wrote one based on my description. It has the ABBA rhyme scheme that–despite being a simple thing–he finds a way to make his own. In the verses he sings very rythmically, but in the chorus, he breaks away from the downbeats, and hesitates after “good” before suddenly lurching through the rest of the words in the line, and that, of course, is also something that I would have pointed out as characteristic. Then, of course, this is one of his many songs that are really two songs stitched together, and the second half of this song is arranged very much like a Catholics song, especially with the slide lead, which is beautiful. The singing in the second half sounds more like his early work to me than his Catholics period, but of course, it’s all Frank Black.

I’ve seen It’s Just Not Your Moment called the worst song on the record on the forums, but this was the first one that really grabbed me, and here, again, the slide guitar screams Catholics. The bass line is the big stretch on this song, because it sounds like something out of a Holland-Dozier-Holland track from the 60’s, and unlike any of his work that I can remember, but then, it was this bass track that first drew my attention to the song when I was driving around listening to the record those first few days. This will probably be the first song from FMRM that cracks my top tracks, and notice again, the long coda that is not quite a second song.

Fitzgerald was a sleeper for me. The first few times, I thought it was a quaint piano song, but one of the times I was listening to it, everything got real quiet when Frank Sang “Oh, Fitzy,” and that brought it to my attention. This is the one that doesn’t really sound like a Catholics song to me, although some of the guitar work in the end of the song is close.

And now I see I’ve picked all songs from disc 2, but I just call them like I see them.

When I accidentally leave winamp on repeat overnight, and The Amps jump up to 460 plays, that’s when the profile editor becomes unavailable. I mean, I like the amps, but not 400 plays in one week’s worth.

So I put together 6 CDs of mp3s for my trip up to Olympia and back, for something like 50 hours worth of music. I knew I only had 24 hours of driving to do, but I wanted to give myself some leeway. Unfortunately, I left them in my default encoding, which is a high quality VBR that comes out to the file-weight of 192kbps encoding (though, thanks to the magic of VBR, enjoys higher quality. It is one of LAME encoder’s options), and the mp3 software in my Mustang’s cd player didn’t handle that very well. It tended to cause skips and short silences at certain points in the music.

I started the trip with Deltron 3030, and listened to a fair amount of Frank Black on the way up. But the big winner on the trip up north was Magnolia Electric Co., and specifically the song The Dark Don’t Hide It, which I listened to probably 15 times in the state of Washington alone. It’s the good stuff.

While I was in Washington, I went to a local show featuring the debut performance of a band called Mechanical Birds, a set by Popoko Darling, and some loud guitar music from The Bride Wore Red. I ended up working the lights and recording the official bootleg (which I have yet to listen to, but apparently something did come out, to my surprise).

On the way back, it was an all-Mountain Goats show. There’s just nothing else remotely like them. But then, from my top artists list, that should be no surprise.

Next time, constant bitrate encoding.

So last week I finally paid tribute to the evil empire and opened an iTunes account. I didn’t want to, because I don’t have an iPod, and I want to be able to play music on my Zen Xtra, and my car stereo accepts mp3 CDs, but those two Frank Black albums finally overwhelmed me.

My favorite track on Snake Oil is Changing of the Guard, which is a cover of Bob Dylan‘s Changing Of The Guards. I’m inherently lousy at detecting when Frank Black is playing a cover, maybe because he plays them in his own way (for instance, when I heard him do Sister Isabel in concert, I had no idea it was a Del Shannon song) so I was curious to hear the original. And because I have iTunes now, that was just $0.99 away.

You can hear the elements of a good rock song in the original, but it’s buried under a flippant arrangement. Granted, it was recorded in 1978, and maybe that… is that reggae I hear… reggae organ was cutting edge, but I think it covers up some good, driving guitar that really comes out in the Catholics version.

Mind you, it’s not the night and day change that you’d get if you listened to the original version of Handyman.

Heard a song called “Destination Home” by Surface Noise on the latest FrankBlack.net podcast, and went over to their website http://www.surfacenoise.nl to see what I could see. They are Dutch, and the website is not in English (though the navigation elements are?), but they have some mp3s under “stuff.” It’s pretty promising stuff.