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photo
by Daragh McDonagh |
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| Date |
City |
Venue |
| Sat 6/21/08 |
Telluride, CO |
Telluride Bluegrass Festival |
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Glen
Hansard - Vocals/Guitar
Colm MacConlomaire - Violin/Keyboard/Vocals
Joseph Doyle - Bass/Vocals
Robert Bochnik - Guitar
Johnny Boyle - Drums
Go to enough extremes and you’ll find a kind of balance.
Until now, The Frames’ music favoured bi-polar swings,
violently loud on one song, violently quiet the next. On Burn
The Maps, their fifth studio album, the band have reconciled
their various personalities into one volatile organism, synthesizing
gorgeous melancholy with full-blown anger.
If 2000’s For the Birds seemed to capture the Dublin/Chicago
quintet playing in a small room with nobody watching, Burn The
Maps turns on the arc lamps. Served by their most faithful production
job yet (courtesy of ex-guitarist Dave Odlum and new guitarist
Rob Bochnik, who formerly spent eight years working at Steve
Albini’s Electrical Audio Studio) and recorded in Black
Box studios in France, the new record is a skilful mix of widescreen
scale and magnifying-glass detail, sort of like putting a Herzog
still under a microscope.
So, you get the self-questioning psychodrama and martial rhythms
of the single ‘Finally’, featuring a hackle-raising
vocal from Glen Hansard and typically panoramic string arrangement
from Colm Mac An Iomaire. You get spiky, nasty pop songs like
‘Fake’ and ‘Underglass’, with its dum-dum
bassline worthy of Kim Deal. You get the seraphic boy soprano
melodies of ‘Happy’ and ‘Sideways Down’
and the graphic 4am truth-or-dare drinking games of ‘Caution’.
And you get epics like ‘Keepsake’, distinguished
by the sort of sea change dynamics associated with Mogwai or
the Dirty Three. In short, here’s a world where Spector
collides with Steve Albini, Arvo Part with Sparklehorse, open-heart
surgery songs that deal in love and hate, mourning and ambition,
art and blood.
But then, The Frames’ career (and one uses the word in
terms of careering wildly as much as any overarching strategy)
has always followed the music. The platinum-selling For The
Birds, released on their own Plateau label in the summer of
2000, marked the end of major label bad marriages, and fired
with newfound independence the band set about forging a sound
based on fidelity to their instincts. The result: an earthenware
collection of skewed avant-folk songs that sounded like they’d
been written in a hole in the ground and recorded in some hi-tech
coastal cave.
Nobody could’ve predicted what happened next. Slowly at
first, but with increased velocity over the next year, things
began to snowball. The album went from gold to platinum, and
in its wake, renewed sales of previous Frames albums such as
Fitzcarraldo and Dance The Devil. Somehow The Frames went from
being Ireland’s biggest cult act to one of its top selling
bands full stop. Plus, they were starting to sell out tours
all across Europe, the US and Australia. Glen did a stint presenting
the music television series Other Voices: Songs From A Room.
Meanwhile back home, they could cherry pick slots on any festival
bill they chose to play (particularly memorable were a Dublin
Castle headliner and brace of consecutive Witnness sets) and
by the summer of 2003, were co-headlining the Lisdoonvarna extravaganza
in front of 30,000 people. Funny thing was, they looked like
they always belonged on that stage. The Frames were no longer
noble underdogs. Now they were the main event.
While preparing their fifth studio album, the band released
the live album Set List, at last capturing their incendiary
stage sound on tape. The Irish public responded by sending it
straight to number one in the charts, making it their third
platinum album. Hot on its heels, the top five single ‘Fake’
was released in September 03, spending months in the singles
charts.
2004 saw The Frames sweep the Hot Press Critics’ and Readers’
Polls, and they also won their first industry gong in the shape
of the Meteor Award for Best Irish Band. More to the point,
the band confirmed a new international deal with Californian
mavericks Anti, arguably the only label in the world that could
claim to be the band’s spiritual home, boasting such artists
as Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Merle Haggard. They celebrated this
by touring America with Damien Rice, and spent the last few
months putting the finishing touches to the new album.
So, Burn The Maps, is at once a musical tour de force and a
statement of intent, an album whose campaign begins with typical
Frames-ian audacity – an outdoor headliner at Marley Park
in front of some 17,000 people.
“With The Frames, it’s the throwing your arms around
the room thing,” says singer/guitarist Glen Hansard. “When
our gigs are at their best, you throw the energy out and it
gets thrown back twice the size. I mean, I find myself saying
things on stage that I would never say in my life, it’s
almost like a whole new character or creature is born when you
walk on. If you trust in the moment, if you’re willing
to be the fool and make the mistake and get it wrong, then you’ve
great potential to get it absolutely right. And I think that
can be the scary thing about a Frames gig and the great thing
about a Frames gig.” |
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THE COST
ANTI
2007
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