Frankie & His Fingers

With the upcoming Universal Hurt and the addition of long-time fan, and brother of Adam, Ryan Stoutenburgh on lead guitar, all the pieces fell back into place, and Frankie & His Fingers are back from the grave.

Recorded largely at Frank’s home in Poughkeepsie, New York, Universal Hurt sounds like a group of friends reconsidering their original spark. Traces of Big Star, The Get Up Kids, Cheap Trick, The Weakerthans, Teenage Fanclub, The Hold Steady, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello permeate the record’s 10 tracks.

It’s the smartest, most complex music the band has ever made, and yet often their most emotionally direct, reaching out to the listener with soaring choruses and walls of guitars. But much has changed in the intervening decade, and Frank’s lyrics these days strike a more cynical tone, flashed through with moments of melancholic self-doubt. “Why do you act like your youth is dead? / The day will come when you wish you were this age instead,” he reflects on “Sad to let you down like this,” while “Gene Kelly & The Truck My Dad Built” finds him settling into his mid-thirties, full of not-entirely discarded desires for something more from life. “Just recalled that I promised my mom I’d be famous by now / And I’d buy her a house” he sings at the song’s opening, but by the end he’s committed to something approaching acceptance: “Let’s try to let go / Of what we can’t know / I think if we turn left here there’s a new road.”