Another Love Song

The margin by which The Frames have so far failed to forcibly etch both themselves and their music onto the minds of the plain people of Ireland remains a source of disappointment, great upset and mystery.

I love The Frames, madly, and with a passion I usually reserve for people like Mark Eitzel, Howard Wilkinson and myself. It annoys me, then, to think that most people are either too chart-fixated or too fucking trendy to give long shrift to a band who are truly capable of great things.

In retrospect The Frames, with their vague raggle taggle associations were always going to have difficulty getting through to rocks' trenderatti. You know, the people who see a fiddle and instantly switch off, the people who cannot take something which may usually be naff, look at it in a new context and then decide that works, simply because it does.

You will at this stage be aware that young Mister Predictable has given Another Love Song a big old happy double six. This is not to say that the album is not without its faults, all of them lyrical. Poor lyrics are always regrettable but only something to get truly worked up about when accompanied by melodies that sound as if they were rescued from somebody's bog.

A good tune conquers all. I wouldn't, for example, allow vastly over-rated Soup Dragons-imitators Primal Scream away with lines like "My heat it is wore" or "I run my hands along the rail like I'm banging on a dead nail" but The Frames always manage to boister these lines with melodies that are intense, heartstopping, intensely heartstopping, and heartstoppingly intense so that at the end of the day and when all's said and done it doesn't really matter.

The songs are wonderful, hugely commercial, immediately immediate and of a type that are as likely to be given airtime by the Dave Fannings of this world as by the oddly surnamed Ian Dempseyinthemorning. Glen Hansard, despite his obvious need for parental supervision when bottles of eye make-up lurk nearby, is a fully paid-up card carrying member of the worldwide genius club who is deserving of nothing but plaudits of flowers and bouquets of love for the dignified manner in which he conducted himself during the whole Commitments episode. Like not forming a band called 'Outspan Fosters Wake' for instance.

The tunes number twelve, and all of them, in one way or another, have been touched by the hand of God. Half of them are gently fragile, the other half rumbustious and raging. Glen's oft-quoted love of The Pixies is beginning to make itself felt, Black Francis gets a special inlay card thank you and 'Live Forever' is a bare-faced, bistant rip-off if ever there was one.

Both singles are include: the album kicks into life with 'The Dancer' which manages somehow to be radically better than the original version while not being radically different. 'Before You Got', 'The Waltz', 'Downhill From Here' but especially 'Picture Of Love' bring loveliness to the uppermost tiptops of seldom attempted peaks. 'Right Road (Wrong Road)' has me dancing, bad back orno, around the bedroom for the first time in weeks.

Basically, Another Love Song is a very fine piece of work. And as the band takes their first tentative steps over rock's rocky rocks, their debut album nestling comfortably in the scented confines of their collective armpits, it only remains for me to send them on their way with a map, some sandwiches and my every good wish.

Uphill from here, boys and girls. Uphill from here.