2006 Issued Sixth Album by the Irish Band featuring the Lineup of Bassist Joseph Doyle, Violinist/Keyboardist Colm Mac Coniomaire, Lead Guitarist Rob Bochnik, Drummer Graham Hopkins (Subbing for Johnny Boyle) and Vocalist/Guitarist Glen Hansard. The Album was Recorded in France at Black Box Studios. Three of the Songs were Released in Previous Incarnations Prior to the LP Release and have Been Re-recorded by the Band for this Project: "Rise" First Appeared on the 2003 EP "The Roads Outgrown" and "Falling Slowly" and "When Your Mind's Made Up" were First Heard on "The Swell Season", an Album Issued by Guitarist Hansard and Pianist Marketa Irglova. The Haunting Cover Art Comes from a Photograph by Hansard.You're three tracks into The Cost before you find a song, "The Rise," that opens with anything but singer Glen Hansard's voice as the first thing you hear. The beauty is, you're waiting for the voice, with its hints of Cat Stevens's tonality and its utterly distinct Irish lift. It's Hansard that provides the Frames with such a rising vibe, the sense of a band always lifting off, pressed higher by Colm Mac An Iomaire's violin. Mac An Iomaire's strings slip and slide in the thickets of guitar, playing exceptional cat and mouse both when the guitars are clear and crisp and when they're crashing furiously. The Frames wouldn't claim to write epic tunes, but over and over the songs build toward ecstatic sonic events. Witness the hushed open to "People Get Ready" how it morphs into a violin and guitar-grit blast of wind-blown energy or the distortion-scoured hum behind Hansard's lone voice on "True" launching a languorous, piano-driven backdrop as the singer lets loose a first-class yowl--the stuff of anguished beauty. --Andrew Bartlett
