MP3: Frank Black – “Robert Onion” from the “best of” comp, 93-03, on Cooking Vinyl. Bonus: Frank Black – “Ten Percenter” (live) from Disc 2.

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Press release after the jump…

“Frank Black 93-03,” a chronological anthology of Frank Black’s work covering the Pixies’ front man’s nine solo albums recorded during that time period, comes out today in the U.S. through Cooking Vinyl. The two-disc set will include a bonus CD of live tracks recorded during Black’s Fall 2006 North American tour, as well as a brand new Black Francis track, “Threshold Apprehension,” taken from his forthcoming “Bluefinger” album, due for release in September.

According to Black, “There is totally a narrative arc to my solo career. It sounds trite, but in basic language this is what’s happening on these songs: it’s me breaking away from the Pixies and finding myself as a solo artist, finding a band again and forging that together, then losing it and my marriage, and finally getting my obsession with two-track recording out of my system. It’s a total arc.

“I’ve got a big back catalogue, and so for the uninitiated, ‘Frank Black 93-03’ is a good place to start. It just sounds like a regular Frank Black album because all my records are schizophrenic in tenor – fast song, slow song, country song, punky song. Although it’s boring to say, ‘I think it’s very representative of who I am as an artist’, it really is!”

As Black Francis, Boston-bred Black was one of the architects of modern rock as front man of the Pixies, whose “loud-quiet-loud” dynamics, primal scream intensity and free-ranging compositional style exerted a huge influence on alternative music. His solo recordings as Frank Black demonstrated his artistic restlessness, embracing alternative pop and avant-garde rock with equal fervor; he continued exploring this territory with a new band, The Catholics, for several years before journeying to Nashville to create 2005’s critically-acclaimed “Honeycomb.”