Black Francis [ tickets ] is back. But maybe not the one you were expecting.

When Frank Black [ tickets ] announced his intention to resurrect his original stage name for his latest studio album, "Bluefinger," many of his old fans took that tidbit to mean that the old indie rocker would be making a return to the menacing, howling, boy genius who paced stages back in the '80s while fronting the legendary Pixies [ tickets ].

The record Black/Francis (whose real real name is Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV, just to make things more confusing) actually ended up making, though, owes more to the singer/guitarist's first pair of solo albums following the Pixies' premature death: his self-titled 1993 solo debut and 1994's brilliant, 22-songs-in-just-over-an-hour "Teenager of the Year."

Ideas appear out of thin air all over "Bluefinger," then vanish just as quickly as they came. In the same way that Black once convincingly excavated several layers of the history of Los Angeles in the under-five-minute "Ole Mulholland," a pocket-sized masterwork off "Teenager," here he does the same with the late Dutch artist/musician Herman Brood, except on a slightly larger scale, with every song at least making a passing reference to Brood (a tragic figure who committed suicide in 2001 by jumping off the roof of a Dutch hotel).

Stylistically, though, the sound is expansive here, with Black moving away from the bar-band sound that characterized much of his recent work with The Catholics and experimenting once again with a layered studio; songs like "Captain Pasty" and "Threshold Apprehension" snap, crackle and pop like Black's best work, and "Rest Pilot Blues" even recalls the self-assured Louis Prima-esque groove of the Pixies' "Crackity Jones."

After a torrid start the set falls off a bit, with Black proving unable to sustain the voracious energy of the album's first few songs over the entire record, but there are enough clear moments of breakthrough here for "Bluefinger" to justify the performer's return trip down Black Francis lane.