Hurricanes Of Love

"When Frank Hurricane comes into a room, it's really something. As his name implies, he is impossible to ignore. He has built an alarmingly nuanced lexicon out of an amazingly limited number of phrases. 'Psychedelic.' 'Spiritual.' 'Holy.' 'Gangsta.' 'Pimp.' 'Bro.' 'Homie.' In the hands of the culture-at-large, these terms have long lost whatever literal or subcultural meaning they may have once had and are now so incredibly overused as to be stripped of any meaning whatsoever. In Frank's hands, though, each of these words comes alive and full of varied meaning. On paper here it looks ridiculous, but in the throat of Frank Hurricane they breathe and dance in indescribable ways. There is no way to experience Hurricanes Of Love, Frank's acoustic guitar-based musical project, without surrendering to his singular and indescribable charm. His pleasant picking gives way to manic strumming, stuttering and unpredictable motifs or, hopefully, incredibly meandering verbal introductions. Frank is a wild and singular story-teller, often providing rambling preambles during his live sets that can out-last the songs themselves. Side three of this LP is called 'Holy Story,' and ostensibly does nothing more than provide Frank with a platform for introducing his next song, 'Moose Lake Blues.' What actually happens, though, is that where most people would simply say 'I wrote this next song on tour,' Frank stretches out, providing tributaries of backstory. We meet all kinds of characters, all presented through Frank's strange lens, and it's a treat. It's just as tempting to put Frank in a You Can't Win-style hobo camp as it is to make sense of him as a post-Tim And Eric product of the psych-folk/noise-tape boom, but these sorts of categories invariably break down when confronted with actual life, and Quintorian Blues is nothing else if not a report back from Frank's actual life. You can't throw a roach clip out the driver's-side window these days without hitting a finger-picking guitarist, but you can't throw a star across the galaxy and hit anything like Frank Hurricane, and with those odds, how can you refuse?" - Matt Krefting, Easthampton, MA, 2014