The Earthly Frames mix melody with melancholy on their new album Taped Over — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The album captures the many layers of founder and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Walsh’s original musical vision. Both a multi-talented DIYer and a keen collaborator, Walsh handles vocals, bass, guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, harmonium, and drums — but also enlisted the help of a bevy of talents to contribute fiddle (Neil FitzGibbon), accordion (Daire Mulhearn), pipes (David Stone), harmonica (Mike Ballard), trombone (Nikola Ristevski), tuba (Mike Damnjanovski), violin (Maria Grigoryeva) and cello (Lyudmila Kadyrbaeva).
As you’d expect, the resulting musical arrangements are lush and spellbinding as music greater than the sum of its parts is forged. “This is part of a 10-year project to create an album for ROYGBIV (with black and white),” says Walsh. “This album is blue, inspired by my time in the band Timesbold.”
Indeed, Walsh has been producing experimental pop recordings for decades. Along with sad-songers Timesbold, he has spent time with freaky improvisers Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice, and Hebrew space-rockers The Solillians. With The Earthly Frames, we can hear the through line of layered, warped sounds that Walsh has been honing for a quarter century, joining with a fixation on disjointed, fictional worlds.
Fittingly, Walsh and The Earthly Frames are known for chameleonic, full-stop stylistic shifts between albums. Their first release was a USB drive with a one-of-a-kind narrative fragment. Owners of the devices had to choose whether or not to share their particular artifact with the others to complete the story or keep it to themselves — thereby flipping the notion of music file sharing on its head. The following release came with a card game and short film, all set in the world of a billboard salesman with a nervous breakdown.
Their last album was a dark, experimentally ambient affair themed on ecosystem degradation and the inevitable environmental collapse. This untethered embrace of bold sounds and themes is what sets the project apart from artists who simply forge a signature and tinker with it. Walsh’s work relishes in the profound and the challenging.
Taped Over seems at first to break with this convention, offering some straightforward, melancholy Americana. The lyrics and title focus on a pre-digital, younger era. The music, too, doesn’t veer far from the folk-rock formula of banjos, mandolins, harmonica, and Nashville-sounding baritone guitars that were popular in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.
However, on closer listen, the heady SF metaphysics from the Frames’ previous materials are still there. On the opening track My Worst Self, the singer is not just referring to a bad day, but an alternate universe. In Pixels, Walsh’s shrill and affected voice notes to the ever-present screen molecule, “It’s a funny little world you’ve got yourself rendered here.” The title track, seems not to talk about a nostalgic VHS mishap but about aging and identity: “A plank to the head, on the ship of Theseus, hull marks obscured, we taped over them.”
Listen to Taped Over above and below, and find The Earthly Frames on their website and Instagram.
