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the Frames
The Cost
Anti
The follow up to last year’s somber masterpiece Burn The Maps, The Frames’ sixth album The Cost is a ruminative and smoldering collection. Singer Glen Hansard, whose intensity is practically peerless, checks back in with ten new songs that capture the existential angst and internal surges that keep us up at night waiting for answers. Mortality, busted romance and the price of fame are all on Hansard’s mind and he sings of these subjects with a grace that is gloriously bruised, yet coiled in frustration. That being said, the numbers that make up The Cost are crushed lullabies that come in waves of deeply personal musical contemplation. “Song For Someone” builds to a billowing finale; “Falling Slowly” (whose subject is a metaphorically sinking boat), manages a perfectly wobbly pace; and “Sad Songs” is a breezy number that finds Hansard, in a moment of self-deprecation, admitting, “Too many sad words make for sad, sad songs.” Later, “True” is a spare and elegiac ballad and the album closer “Bad Bone” is a lonely weeper, benefiting from a drowsy, hypnotic backbeat. Hansard is a lyricist of great depth and in one line he can bring you to your knees. “The price of fame,” he sings on “Sad Songs,” “is that they love you when you’re gone.” Stark, stunning and painfully true, The Cost impossibly captures what it sounds like when your world is crashing down and all you can do about it is keep perfectly still.
—Alex Green
(From Amplifier)
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