The Frank And Walters

Beauty Becomes More Than Life
(Setanta/CD)
Jim Wirth
8/10

Destiny calls at the strangest moments. The zeitgeist having deserted them, Cork's Frank And Walters should be wandering around dazed like the survivors of an air crash. In fact, holed up in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn, they've been feverishly scrawling their embittered, hopelessly obscure big, final strangulated fuck-off to anyone prepared to listen.

'Beauty Becomes More Than Life' is a barbed epistle to the future; the final chapter of a non-existent parallel history of '90s pop. They never really made it, sure, but here's what you could have had: the tremelo-laden '7.30' or the sporadically vicious 'Time We Said Goodnight', where Paul Linehan sings about a doomed love affair with a calculated venom which sounds like a thinly veiled metaphor for their career apocalypse.

Inevitably, elegiac closing track 'Until The End' steals the show with its nebulous pay-off line, "When it's not perfect/It will be worth it in the end". It fades to nothing before they shuffle off into oblivion knowing that they've left us with their finest hour.

A lost classic for the 21st century.