Hearing a new Black Francis album is sort of like running into an ex-cheerleader at your high school reunion. You analyze her with horrified fascination, scouring her for evidence of how unpopular she's become: how her hair's falling out, how her waistline has ballooned like Coke can in a freezer. Luckily, Frank Black was already pudgy, bald, and widely disliked when he disbanded the Pixies (allegedly via fax) back in 1992, so you'd think there'd be nowhere left to go but up. Earlier solo albums like Teenager of the Year and even 2001's Dog in the Sand seemed to confirm the positive slope of his parabola-like trajectory. In them, Black added his own countrified musical twist to the hypnotic surrealism of the Pixies, slathering on the twangy guitar while singing about Parcheesi, monsters, dam failures, hermaphrodites, and coyotes prancing through Los Angeles after dark. Standard Pixies stuff, and material that any lover of the band can easily get behind.

But it seems Black had other plans. As his career has evolved, the parabola seemed to plateau; the old weirdness dissipated, replaced by an arguably more bizarre phenomenon: normality. Black's latest, Bluefinger, is a case in point. The chord progressions are predictable; the melodies aren't the least bit jarring; mentions of natural phenomena and alien abductions are kept to a minimum. There are moments, as in "Threshold Apprehension"—with Black waxing poetic about having sex with the help of "Grand Marnier and a pocketful of speed"—when the master seems to have tapped into some of his old, manic vitality, but falsetto choruses have been known to play tricks on the brain. Try again, Frank—we'll put up with a lot of your stunts, but mediocrity doesn't qualify. Oh, and "Your Mouth Into Mine"? That's just disgusting.—Alex Littlefield