New Black Francis due March 6

"I Sent Away" has been kicking around on YouTube for a few months, but Mr. Frank Black/Black Francis is finally getting around to releasing SVN FNGRS, the sex-and-birth(?!)-obsessed mini-album from whence it comes, on March 7. Not a moment too soon: we were beginning to get bored with trying to pong Frank's head into the bucket over at his fancy new website. And since his press lady was nice enough to send off a very blog-like check-in from Francis himself, we figured we'd just publish it, since it's far weirder than anything we coulda written about it. Suffice to say that "I Sent Away" is pretty damn punk, and so's the video: if we didn't know better, we'd suspect the treatment went something like, "Francis wears a hoodie and pretends to mosh." You think this guy couldn't write another Pixies album? C'mon now.

From the inbox:

Cooking Vinyl has agreed to release my latest session (thank you CV!), which I have called SVN FNGRS, on March 4, 2008 [in the U.S.]. It was written, recorded and mixed in six days, and on the seventh day, Mark Lemhouse did artwork. The band for the session was myself, of course, on guitar, vocals and harmonica, Jason Carter on drums, and Violet Clark on bass. The session was produced by Jason Carter. There are seven (7) songs clocking in at 20 minutes and so I suppose it qualifies as a mini-LP under the old formats. No one seems to know or care what the current format models are (a very weakened LP on compact disc continues to rule the roost by default), which is WONDERFUL; so let's just call it music and pay whatever price your Google research turns up. If you want it for free, you can usually find some tracks for free download on my Myspace page or on my own blackfrancis.net. The production is sparse in terms of the band, which, by the way, seems to be a kind of 'Black Francis' thing that has been developing ever since I went back to the old stage name, but is much more produced in terms of the vocal layering of my own voice, perhaps along the lines of TEENAGER OF THE YEAR. I won't bother you here with what the damn concept is, but let's just say the theme revolves around a lot of NASTY sex, NASTIER death, and beautifully strange birth. It was a coincidence that the whole 'finger' thing turns up again; management asked for a digital b-side for a BLUEFINGER track and what they got was this seven fingered thing which is not related to the HERMAN BROOD concept, although I assure you he would approve of all this nasty business. I have made a video for the song I SENT AWAY (one of the birth songs) and you can see it on YouTube and other places, so I guess that qualifies as the first single as released by the impatient artist. I believe the more pragmatic record company is releasing another song (THE SEUS - Charles Normal re-mix) as ITS first single and I'll make an Internet vid for that one too, as soon as I finish recording the digital b-side for THAT (maybe I'll do a self indulgent symphony - note to myself; symphony wiki - written in 10 minutes); DAMN! That espresso this morning was BLACK and STRONG! BLACK & STRONG & LONG!! MUDDY BLACK WATER! My brain is exploding.....

--Black Francis

Oh, yeah, one more thing: who dat?