Album Review: The Frames - Longitude

Last year, I had a list of “think pieces” or “long reads” or whatever on a sticky note on the computer for this blog—most of which involved nostalgia in some form or another, and I think all of them were looking back on a decade after something—a decade after Flickerstick’s Tarantula album, I guess that I kind of touched on a little in my review of Jetta and The Ghost Tree’s debut; a decade after Iron and Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days; and lastly, a decade of listening to The Frames.

The Frames never could really quite break through in the United States, which is too bad, because as a band, they were always on the cusp of it. Of course, frontman Glen Hansard went on to form The Swell Season, which only broke because of the film Once, which subsequently kind of caused the end of The Frames. The band itself still performs on occasion, usually in celebration of an anniversary of something: the 20^th anniversary of the band, the 10^th anniversary of their landmark For The Birds record, etc.

They haven’t released an album in nearly a decade, but earlier in the month, to celebrated their 25^th anniversary, the band put together a “mixtape” if you will, and released Longitude, their first ever anthology.

The concept of a singles collection, a best of, a greatest hits, etc. is one that just asks people to buy all the shit they already have, just paired down and truncated down into one place. There usually needs to be some kind of incentive for you to plunk down your hard earned money for music you have in other places. I’m not sure if he was the first to do it, but Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” a new song tucked away on a greatest hits album, was one of the earliest examples of finding away to get people on board with repurchasing things they may have already had.

So the idea of the “new song” or an unreleased song included with a collection of things you know has been kicking around for over 20 years now. In the case of Longitude, the band says it’s not really a “best of,” but just a collection of career spanning songs that fit best together- representation from their canon is slightly stacked in favor of certain albums, and the 17 track set includes one brand new song, as well as two re-recorded versions of old favorites dating back to 1996’s Fitzcarraldo.

I first discovered The Frames at a theater in Madison, WI, when they opened for and upstaged fellow Irish performer Damien Rice. Rice was coasting through on the earliest of waves of success in the States following the release of O in 2004, and he picked The Frames to open. They had found regional success stateside, specifically in Chicago, but outside of that, I think they were, and still are to some extent, relatively unknown here.

I found every album I could by The Frames—their live album Set List, their magum opus For The Birds, and its companion EP The Roads Outgrown, the dated sounding Fitzcarraldo, and the transitional Dance The Devil, an album that showed what the band was coming from, and where they were heading, sonically.

In the fall of 2004, they released Burn The Maps, a gorgeous, dense, and weighty record that includes some of their most enduring work like “Keepsake” and the experimental “A Ship Caught in The Bay” (one of two songs from this record represented on Longitude.)

Their “final” record arrived two years later—The Cost was recorded following Hansard’s one off project The Swell Season, where he met and subsequently started balling 18-year-old pianist Marketa Irglova. The Swell Season became the genesis for the film Once, which won the duo an Academy Award, spawned a Broadway adaptation, and in a sense, put the nails in the coffin to The Frames. To follow up the Swell Season’s self-titled and minimalistic debut, they returned to the studio with The Frames in tow, serving as a backup band with the focus now on the interplay between Hansard and Irglova, who broke up around the time Strict Joy was released in 2009.

Since then, Hansard has released one solo album and is prepping one more for release in September. My hope with Longitude was that, in celebrating the 25^th anniversary of The Frames, it meant that a proper new album was on the way, but this, as of right now, does not seem to be the case.

Forgoing anything from their first album, released in the early 1990s, Longitude pulls a bulk of its material from Fitzcarraldo, Dance The Devil, and For The Birds. The Cost is also represented by only two songs, with the powerful anthem “People Get Ready” beginning the second half of the record, and the snoozer of a title track sequenced shortly after that.

The LP edition comes in at 17 tracks including the re-recorded songs, a new song, and a b-side from 1996, Longitude works surprisingly well because of how intelligent the sequencing is. Presumably members of The Frames labored over how this should work as a whole, and that fact is alluded to in the note that is included in the liners about why the band opted to go this route when putting together something that referenced its entire career.

Longitude is, however, far from flawless—but it’s minor details that I’m nitpicking on here. In rerecording two of their best loved, live songs, “Fitzcarraldo” and “Revalate,” they stripped away some of the dated production values from the album versions, as well as adding in some of the bombast of the lives the songs took on in the last 20 years. The same could have, and maybe should have, been done for some other older songs, like “God Bless Mom,” which still suffers from its annoying, watery sounding vocal effect—something that they did away with on an alternate take recorded for The Roads Outgrown EP.

Pulled from Dance The Devil, the lullaby “Star, Star” didn’t need to benefit from a re-recording or an alternate take, but could have worked better in this set if the segue at the end of the song had been removed: part of the novelty of that album from 1999, are the instrumental segues buried in negative time between songs—taking you from one, into the other. “Seven Day Mile” smartly does away with the radio stack intro to “Pavement Tune,” however here, “Star, Star” retains the compressed drum intro that leads into “Stars Are Underground.” However, on Longitude, it takes you into the gorgeous, unfuckwitahble instrumental “In The Deep Shade,” which is probably my favorite Frames track. It doesn’t not work, but would have been exponentially more successful had that little bit just been clipped in the compiling process.

There are not really any misfires as far as song selection, and there are some surprises. Putting the slow burning “The Cost” in the collections’ latter half slows the pacing down, and could maybe been swapped out for a different song from the album of that same name. The omission of “Falling Slowly and “When You’re Mind’s Made Up” are reasons to thank the based god, and the inclusion of the b-side “Look Back Now” and the Burn The Maps “deep cut” “A Ship Caught in The Bay” provide some healthy weight when filed in with singles and fan favorites.

I guess the real thing we should be focusing on here, rather than waxing nostalgic for a band that pretty much ceased to be in 2007, is the new song, “None But I.”

Now, here is presuming that this, is, in fact, a new song, and not a studio left over from sessions for The Cost. And once news of this single broke, I shared it on my Facebook feed and a friend responded with, “does it start quietly and end loudly?” or something like that.  And yes, yes it does, it is a Frames song after all.

It’s a big of a freewheeling anthem, looser in structure than some of their other “big” sounding songs, like “People Get Ready,” for example. It rolls along quickly before it arrives to the point of lift off, and even then, it’s reserved in how bombastic it becomes—either showing the age of the band, or showing growth in their abilities to skew the stereotype ever so slightly.

However, like the band’s best and most emotionally driven material, it’s got those frisson-inducing moments, specifically in the verses as Hansard slowly works out the tension into a glorious, shimmering release.

For longtime fans of the band, this serves as a little bit of ephemera, but it is incredible to hear some of these songs on vinyl for the first time, like “Seven Day Mile” and “A Ship Caught in The Bay.” And despite the overwrought emoting that Hansard and company have always brought to the table, it’s just fun to revisit the band’s history in this context.

For the first time listener, it’s not the perfect introduction to the band, but it’s close, or at least, a good place to start.

 Longitude captures the band at its most self-aware—both with the “hey we’re in a band” lyrics of “People Get Ready,” but also subtle winks at the fact that this is, in a sense, a best of collection in the decision to include “Your Face” on here, with its lyric, “I’ve got to get this tape to you,” as well as the b-side from the same era, “Look Back Now”:

And if we look back now, And see how far your tiny ship has come

And if we look back know, We see how willingly some bridges burn

25 years in and counting, The Frames, at least in the United States, could never escape the cult following for the mainstream success they found in their native Ireland and elsewhere. They’ve burned maps and bridges, and practically destroyed their legacy with inactivity and Glen Hanasard’s solo meanderings and ill-fated side projects, but if anything, Longitude serves as a hearty reminder of why, even in 2015, The Frames still matter—and as Hansard belts out in “None But I,”—“Always remember your song”—for the fan like myself, this album is s a reminder of why you fell in love with the band in the first place.

Longitude is out (kind of) now via Plateau/Anti Records. A shortened version missing five songs from the LP is available in the US iTunes store. The vinyl and CD versions, both imports from Ireland, are currently unavailable from the band's website.  The CD is still listed on Irish Music Mail, but the LP isn't. It may be available in the US on July 31st.