Home Read Classic Album Review: The Frames | Burn the Maps

Classic Album Review: The Frames | Burn the Maps

This came out in 2005 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):

 


Frames frontman and founder Glen Hansard is said to have named his band after his youthful fascination with bicycles. Pity.

Nothing against two-wheelers — it’s just that the painterly allusion the name also inspires would be far more appropriate. If anybody can remind you in these dark times that every now and then rock can still be elevated to true art, it’s this Dublin quartet. Every song on their sixth studio album Burn the Maps, like most of the songs in their catalogue, is a near-perfect marriage of passion, creativity and craftsmanship. Drawing from a palette of lush melodies, surging rhythms, burnished textures, dynamic tension and serrated guitar squalls, the band paint majestic, breathtaking backdrops for Hansard’s quavering, earnest soliloquies of regret, rebirth and resolve. Superb. Even if you don’t know art.