The Cost - Music (Frames)

You're three tracks into The Cost before you find a song, "The Rise," that opens with anything but singer Glen Hansard's voice as the first thing you hear. The beauty is, you're waiting for the voice, with its hints of Cat Stevens's tonality and its utterly distinct Irish lift. It's Hansard that provides the Frames with such a rising vibe, the sense of a band always lifting off, pressed higher by Colm Mac An Iomaire's violin. Mac An Iomaire's strings slip and slide in the thickets of guitar, playing exceptional cat and mouse both when the guitars are clear and crisp and when they're crashing furiously. The Frames wouldn't claim to write epic tunes, but over and over the songs build toward ecstatic sonic events. Witness the hushed open to "People Get Ready" how it morphs into a violin and guitar-grit blast of wind-blown energy or the distortion-scoured hum behind Hansard's lone voice on "True" launching a languorous, piano-driven backdrop as the singer lets loose a first-class yowl--the stuff of anguished beauty. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews of The Cost

C. O'Brien
Scotland, UK
12th June 2007

Celtic folk-rockers prove once again that not all great music is about pushing the envelope
The Frames are one of those veteran bands who are kings in their own realm but almost unknown beyond its borders. Regularly reaching the top of the album charts in Ireland, the Dublin-based outfit has nevertheless failed to make an international impact.

Perhaps it's the lack of a unique selling point. Cynics might say this is just another generic celtic folk-rock album, where almost every song slow builds to a big anthemic chorus and bungs in a violin solo half-way through. Others might say it wears its influences on its sleeve. "True" is a virtual clone of Radiohead's "Climbing Up The Walls" before it morphs into a weird duet with Hansard's tormented vocals soaring over Czech singer Markéta Irglová's semi-conversational counterpoint. "Falling Slowly" and "Song For Someone" both invite comparisons with Coldplay, though both outclass that undeservedly massive band within half a verse. "People Get Ready", meanwhile, references the hummingbird-at-a-flower guitar work of U2's Edge.

Thing is, envelope-pushing originality only takes you so far, and none of it matters a damn when the songs are this good and performed with this kind of sincerity and fervour. Hansard has obviously been having a rough time in the romantic stakes and the lyrics pull no punches, tearing away at guilt and regret and self-disgust with a desperation which chills "I find it so hard to be true / And all these lies I'm telling you / Are little anchors in my chest / That pull us down into this mess."

Meanwhile the gossamer "Rise" builds into a thing of vicious passion, raising the ghost of Jeff Buckley's "Grace" (in fact, an as-yet-unknown Buckley once roadied for the band and singer Glenn Hansard wrote 1999's "Neath The Beeches" in his memory). And "Bad Bone" is an excoriating look at the "jealousy that's killed every love I've ever known", explored with a sexual honesty matched only, perhaps, by eccentric outsider Will Oldham.

The album sags a little in the middle, with the so-so "When Your Mind's Made Up" and "Sad Songs" failing to live up to the grandeur of the album's first half - or indeed, its closing trio. But peaks and troughs are part of what makes music human - and this is very human music, recorded live and sans overdubs with all the human resonance and random imperfection that implies.

Derek h
aylesbury, bucks United Kingdom
27th May 2007

Great album : 30 seconds off a perfect one
At it's best on tracks on stripped down tracks like Bad Bone, and the Cost with their breathy vocals. At it's worst on the intro of People Get Ready: an uncharacteristic 30s of Coldplay pastiche which ruins an elsewise solid track. Every one is allowed one small mistake: copy every thing but that one track to your MP3 and your think it a great album.

Robert M. Parker
parkton, md USA
9th December 2006

Great Band remains under the radar
I love The Frames....and for the life of me cannot comphrehend why they are not well-known in the main stream....haunting,emotional songs of life....great lyrics...superb musicians...they have it all...yet seem to be ignored my major music critics...thought this CD was even more intense than BTM....and Live Set remains one of the finest live albums I have ever heard...wish these guys some good fortune...they sure deserve it...

CasualReviewer
London, UK
16th November 2006

The Cost of being unknown outside Ireland
Another bloody good Frames album, in the vein of Burn The Maps.

Read on if you want more...

I guess I am a rare breed, a Frames fan who does not come from Ireland. Admittedly I have "Irish Connections", and that is how i first got to hear The Frames. I have always been tormented by the fact that The Frames are so unknown in the UK - surely they deserved more than that!

I went through a long period of obsessive fan-dom leading up to the release of Burn The Maps. I was certain BTM would finally give the band the recognition they finally deserved in the UK. Predictably this didnt happen. I eventually ended up drifting away from The Frames, my albums overplayed, too many gigs attended, my friends bored sick of me trying to convert them.

Then comes The Cost. And with it a revelation. The band obviously make their albums very much for themselves. No stadium rock anthems on this album, no instant radio hits. And you know what? Good on them. This is an intensley personal album, Glen Hansard sounds like he's been having a tough time since BTM in his personal life. This comes across very clearly in The Cost. Thats not to say the album is depressing, yet again its full of beautiful songs, with a realistic yet uplifting vibe to it.

Now im back listening to the Frames, but now im doing it for myself and enjoying their music once again. If youre a fan you will LOVE this album, like all the others.

And for those who have never heard of The Frames, its your loss - honestly, it really is. But i will not be prosletysing to all and sundry any more.

GLADIS
UK
3rd November 2006

Wonderful stuff!
U want great songs, melodies and lyrics! Here they all are. This one is another winner from a fine Irish band who keep delivering the goods. Standouts are 'Song for Someone'(Sweeping),'People get ready'(funky fiddling ago-go) 'Rise', 'True' and the fine closing song that is 'Bad bone'. This album fits nicely into 'Burn the Maps' territory and has it's own beauty and grace that make it worth a tenner of anyones money! Go buy this cd, stick it in the player thingy, get a large glass of wine, the one you adore and snog the face of her to this, it's LUSH!