Pop CD of the week

Glorious in defeat

It's been going wrong for the Frank and Walters for years, but they're past caring - which is what makes Glass such a winner

John Aizlewood
Friday January 12, 2001
The Guardian

The Frank and Walters
Glass (Setanta)

£10.99

It is hardly giving away state secrets to acknowledge that things are not going well for Cork's Frank and Walters. When their 1992 debut Trains, Boats and Planes reached 36 on the British charts, they were a cheery antidote to grim, self-regarding Britpop. Foolishly, they embraced novelty, dressing up in ludicrous stage costumes, generally submerging their dignified and very human songs in Cheggers Plays Pop-style frippery. Although Radiohead and Suede would support them on tours, they paid the inevitable price, and after taking five years on the follow-up, Grand Parade, it wasn't so much that the writing was on the wall, more that the wall had been demolished and replaced by an internet cafe.

A world-weary air of mishandled defeat hangs over the whole enterprise of their fourth album, Glass. The sleeve is an out-of-focus photograph of a left hand, which screams Do Not Buy, and the word from the Frank and Walters bunker is that they have gone dance. It is, you might think, not worth bothering. But you would be wrong.

In the very best sense, the Frank and Walters don't care any more. For all the ennui that surrounds Glass, these 12 tracks are the sound of a liberated band. All their strengths remain. Paul Linehan's voice is as warm and appealing as ever. They might have lost their publishing deal, but their way with an instant and durable melody - which once seemed set to entrance a generation - burns as brightly as ever. The cast of characters who populate their songs keeps growing: the suburban teenage girl set free by the power of music on Underground; the bad husband of Paradise and the intriguing hero of Looking For America, who sacrificed his dreams for love and would do the same again. These are not clever or glamorous people, but they ring true and they are blessed with the most generous of musical settings.

Those "going dance" rumours are not totally unfounded, but the Frank and Walters are hardly the Soup Dragons. Instead, Niall Linehan's guitar no longer carries the musical weight alone. The keyboards have broadened their musical palette and, yes, it is perfectly danceable. Nothing has been lost, but much has been gained.

Everything here has its merits, but Underground, already an unsuccessful single, merges old and new Frank and Walters. Its verses build slowly into an inevitable but almighty chorus duet between Paul Linehan and backing vocalist Marlena Buck. It's as sublime as peak-period Lightning Seeds.

Then there is New York. Stately of pace, but moving and uplifting of tone, it is quite the best, most evocative, song about that city since Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl's Fairytale. It concerns a woman who has fallen in love with the place: "We went racing in the sun/Spending days just walking streets/And the nights with Village queens". Then, from out of nowhere, comes a woman's voice, ethereally humming a heart-stoppingly beautiful melody where other, lesser, bands would have simply plonked a chorus.

Glass may well be the Frank and Walters' epitaph. What a waste.