
Green house effect
Joost Bakker’s vision for sustainable housing is taking rootSeptember 2005
Arts & Letters
‘Honeycomb’ by Frank Black
This is a Sunday afternoon barbecue record: people milling about, sausages turning, maybe some Mexican beer. “Who’s this?” someone asks. “It’s the guy who used to be in The Pixies,” someone else replies. There are blank looks until another person, the owner of the record perhaps, adds: “He’s gone to Nashville and made a country album with some famous old players. Sounds good, doesn’t it.” And it does. People nod, the dog barks and Honeycomb drifts nicely around the garden encircled by the picket fence.
The sleeve credits pronounce that “no digital manipulation was used”, and the sound is lovely, warm and rich, picking up every lick those old players – Steve Cropper, Reggie Young, Buddy Miller, pianist Spooner Oldham – lay down. It’s the dream-team a record collector would put forward if they were asked to assemble a band. And in a roundabout way that is the album’s pitch: alternative rock god cuts loose off-the-cuff album with super-respected A-list older guys he digs.
For the most part it works. Black’s voice breaks and croaks and can then go pure honey. His songwriting is professional enough and inspired in places – “I Burn Today” and “Sing For Joy” – while other songs roll and move in ways we have heard before. His strength is melody, his weakness lyrics, which tend to match first-thought rhyme with irritating stream-of-consciousness logic. The three covers come with mixed results. Do we really need another version of “Dark End of the Street”? But it’s almost as if Honeycomb is operating on another level. The concept works. It’s not background music and yet it slides into the background, with a classic ’70s feel, so that back at the barbecue someone is saying “isn’t this a great record?” – when, in fact, it’s not.
Green house effect
Joost Bakker’s vision for sustainable housing is taking rootVaccine rollout a (p)fizzer
The government came with good news, but the rollout remains a shamblesSerenity
Give us not serenity but a sense of urgency in the face of catastrophic climate changeThe death of Yokununna: ‘Return to Uluru’
Mark McKenna explores Australia’s history of violence, dispossession and deception through one tragic incidentGirls don’t cry: Arlo Parks and Phoebe Bridgers
Two young musicians spark the old double standard of judging female artists who demonstrate their painThe death of Yokununna: ‘Return to Uluru’
Mark McKenna explores Australia’s history of violence, dispossession and deception through one tragic incidentThe lightness of unbearable being: ‘Double Blind’
Edward St Aubyn tackles familiar themes – desire, drug use, psychoanalysis – via a fresh suite of charactersAmorality tale: ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’
Told from an unexpected perspective, Shaka King’s film is one of the best recent-historical dramas‘On the Line’ by Joseph Ponthus
Poetry is found in the processing plants of Brittany‘Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment’
This AGSA exhibition goes a long way to redress an Australian artist’s meagre reputation‘The Committed’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The philosophical thriller sequel to ‘The Sympathizer’ sends its Vietnamese protagonists to the Paris underworld‘For the first time’ by Black Country, New Road
The debut from the latest British Art School Band delivers perfect pop with arch lyrics that owe a debt to Jarvis CockerSerenity
Give us not serenity but a sense of urgency in the face of catastrophic climate changeBitter pill: ‘Collective’
This staggering documentary exposes institutionalised corruption in Romanian hospitalsAll things considered: Emily Maguire’s ‘Love Objects’
The Australian writer’s latest novel portrays hoarding with an acute understanding of the deeply human desire to connectHeld in common: ‘The National’ at the MCA
Foregrounding women’s practice, this exhibition of contemporary Australian art proposes a poetics of inclusion
Comments