THE FRAMES Irish band has time on its side after 15 years of disappointments

The band's last five albums have won the critics' acclaim but haven't sold well.
By JOHN BENSON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
The cocktail of hype and critical acclaim may be an intoxicating elixir, but you'll have to forgive the Frames frontman Glen Hansard if he doesn't take a sip.
For more than a decade, the Frames, one of Ireland's biggest bands, has been traversing the Atlantic hoping to grow an audience one album and one show at a time. Its singer-songwriter material, with Irish rock guitars and just enough fiddle to keep its Celtic passports in good standing, is just waiting to be discovered by an American adult-alternative audience.
Yet the band's five albums have the dubious distinction of being critically acclaimed with very little record sales to show for it. This is the case with its most recent album, 2004's "Burn the Maps."
"When people in interviews say, 'Your band is really great' and 'How do you feel about all of this great press?,' it's like I don't feel it," said Hansard, calling from Southern California. "All you really know how to do is struggle. So even when some good news comes, you struggle with that. We struggle with everything."
New record company
Formed more than 15 years ago in Dublin, the members of the Frames have experienced the romance of hype before being left at the altar more than a few times. The group has consistently been caught up in record company bureaucracy or just bad timing. However, the five-piece's struggle took a turn for the better recently when it found a stateside home with Epitaph imprint Anti Records.
Considering the recent mainstream attention afforded to Damien Rice, Coldplay and other new singer-songwriter-sounding acts, the band appears to be right on time. Its two most recent albums -- 2000's "For the Birds" and "Burn the Maps" -- featured a sea change of sorts for the group, which left behind its anthems for more heartfelt and tortured material.
"I just think your subject matter becomes more specific when you're getting older," Hansard said. "Instead of being concerned with how the world is, you start to be concerned with is your hair falling out. How's my mother? It's almost like your life becomes much more simple. So, as I was younger, it was much more swords and much more kind of the Old Testament sort of clouds of fire and lightning and wrath. And nowadays, it's more, I suppose, Zen."
With more than two dozens songs already written for its next album, which the band hopes to record early next year for a tentative mid-2006 release date, Hansard said the material falls into two categories: mellow and rocking. Concertgoers attending the Frames upcoming Cleveland show Friday at the Beachland Ballroom can expect to hear new tracks "Falling Slowly" and "No More I Love You."
Improvising
Arguably one of Hansard's greatest skills as a frontman is his improvisational ability. In midsong he seamlessly segues from a Frames tune into something else: Wilco and the Magnetic Fields material seem to be getting a lot of attention of late.