The Frames
The Cost
Release Date: Feb 20, 2007
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Anti
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Album Review: The Cost by The Frames
Fairly Good, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 9/10
The title track is a weeper, fueled by a slow distorted electric guitar, a snare and a hi hat. Hansard's spare phrasing and his way of spacing his lines apart allow the song's meaning -- as classic a theme of love and loss as has been recorded in this century thus far -- to come through in the silences. "Bad Bone" is the set's final cut. With a slow, whispering acoustic guitar entering just after his vocal Hansard sings: "There's a bad bone inside of me/all my trouble started there/and all the cracks are adding up to be/a little more than you can bear .
Based on rating 2.0/5
Review Summary: As Glen Hansard’s third full-length release in eighteen months, it’s no shame that just one has fallen far short of expectations. Anybody who’s not Irish, or at least takes an interest in the Irish music scene- essentially the same thing, transposed to a Venn diagram it looks like a tiny panda bear- will have difficulty understanding just how integral The Frames are to the current Irish music scene. Equally, those who do understand tend to be slightly bemused by their inability to translate that success at home to the world at large.
Opinion: Poor
Following 2005 scorcher Burn the Maps, the Frames' sixth studio disc goes for broke and comes up bust. While the Irish darlings always harbored epic ambitions, The Cost's overblown arrangements, trite songwriting, and frontman Glen Hansard's hopelessly predictable whispers building into cringing falsetto result in maudlin caricatures. Even Colm MacConiomaire's violin, the most dynamic element of the group, sounds overwrought and sentimental behind Hansard's wail.