The Frames
Glen Hansard barely spoke. Singer, guitarist and leader of the Frames, Hansard is normally an engrossingly loquacious frontman, generating offbeat tales, observations and general babble between (and occasionally during) songs. But apart from emphatically shutting up a heckler, Hansard trained his energies on music at the Black Cat on Tuesday night, leading his band through a magnificent 50-minute set.
The Frames enjoy widespread popularity in their native Ireland -- their latest single sits alongside those by Dido, Beyonce and Christina Aguilera in that country's current Top 10 -- but make the U.S. rounds mostly as opening act for midlevel indie bands. Tuesday they preceded the desert-soundtrackedelica of Calexico and veered from sharp to lush and loud to soft with tight instrumental command. Hansard's melodies are the key to the whole Frames equation, and he sang them with his trademark blend of subway busker and Van Morrison-ese, even slipping some of the latter's "Caravan" into his own "What Happens When the Heart Just Stops."
Fiddler Colm MacConlomaire remained the quintet's instrumental fulcrum, taking solos and tempering the band's classic rock-derived tones, which, on songs like "Santa Maria" and "Lay Me Down," began whisper-quiet and built to distorted, string-scrubbing climaxes. Frames fans have been patiently awaiting a long-promised new album, but Tuesday's show offered only a couple of new numbers, played in the wake of the aforementioned new single "Fake."
Perhaps the new record, when it is released, will be the band's American breakthrough, but until then, the small gathering of fans who shouted the band back for a rare opening-act encore will savor each appearance by these underappreciated musicians.
-- Patrick Foster
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32685-2003Oct15.html
