The Frames
"Burn the Maps," the latest album by the Frames, is a somber, heartbroken affair. Sunday night at the Black Cat, however, the Irish quintet ventured a little too far in the opposite direction. Between the epic ballads, singer Glen Hansard was garrulous and jokey, and the band (sans Hansard) even played a version of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," a tune whose hammering earnestness is inherently comic.
Somewhere between the gags and the bombast, the Frames are generally an appealing band. Their recent songs "Fake" and "Dream Awake" are spry and tuneful, and sounded better without the vast arrangements of the recorded versions. With fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire on paternity leave, there wasn't a violin in sight, though the group added a guitarist to augment the sound. Rather than strain for the symphonic, the massed guitars levitated into exhilarating space-rock vamps.
Though the club was only about half full, Hansard labeled the audience the best and biggest the group had ever encountered in Washington. Emulating the much bigger crowds heard on the band's 2003 live album, "Set List," the fans sang large chunks of several tunes. Under Hansard's direction, they even produced a theremin-like "whoo-ooo" for one of the lulls in "Pavement Tune (I Want My Life to Make More Sense)." Whether the listeners were enraptured or stuck around just because they felt needed, most of them lasted through the entire show, which ran nearly two hours. That was good for the band, because minus the extraneous moments, perhaps two-thirds of the performance was worth the applause.
-- Mark Jenkins
