Album Review: Frame and Mantle – ‘Well of Light’
Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
In the six years since Frame and Mantle released their debut full-length Lost Under Nighttime Sky, the Pittsburgh four-piece began to think they’d never release an album again. Following 2023’s Above a Burning World EP, the band thought their future, if they had one, would be in releasing EPs and one-off singles forever. That their sophomore album, Well of Light, exists at all is almost a happy accident, then, a coincidence: once Frame and Mantle entered the studio, guitarist Brian Thompson shares, they just kept writing.
It’s a good thing that they did, because Well of Light is a big step forward for the band, a more textured and expansive take on emo and post-hardcore than any previous Frame and Mantle material. Lost Under Nighttime Sky, particularly, felt beholden to the band’s more traditional emo influences at times; throughout Well of Light, while they might call to mind other bands or albums, Frame and Mantle are more focused on blazing their own path forward.
Tracks like “Green Grove Zone” and “Not Your Enemy” tap into the jangly, yelpy emo that’s always formed the foundation of their style, but other songs push their sound further. “Failsafe” was an obvious choice for lead single, taking Frame and Mantle into cleaner, more straightforwardly catchy territory than any previous song in their catalog; other songs, like the title track and “Silent Film,” find the band getting softer, spacier, more patient.
“Silent Film,” in particular, begins the album’s closing three-track run, where their post-rock influences really come to the fore. The album’s finale, the five-minute “In the Absence of Sound,” is evidence of Thompson’s professed love of Explosions in the Sky; about halfway through the track, he launches into a triumphant tremolo riff as vocalist/guitarist Connor Freer drops jubilant horns into the mix, sending Well of Light off into the heavens.
Sandwiched between the two is “Changeling,” which spends two-thirds of its runtime slowly, steadily building itself up, slathering horns over drumrolls over skyward-stretching riffs. It turns abruptly, though, and explodes into a cacophony of screams. It plays out like a near-perfect synthesis of both the dark, aggressive Stay Inside of Viewing and the lighter, bouncier Stay Inside of Ferried Away, with a heaping of post-rock dynamism to bring the whole thing home.
While the unclean vocals that rupture “Changeling” are shocking, it’s far from the heaviest song on Well of Light. The moody “Down a Thousand” dissolves into shrieks by its second verse, an update on the sort of bruised alt rock that The Wonder Years toyed with on Sister Cities; “Chokehold” is built on the interplay of screamed verses and clean choruses. Appropriately enough, throughout “Chokehold” and at times over the course of the rest of the album, Freer recalls Nat Gray of Boysetsfire, belting in a manner that suggests a combination of fragility and confidence.
The verses of “Standstill” are another such moment, the delivery sounding like it could’ve been ripped from one of the more melodic Tomorrow Come Today cuts. “The good and bad are both worth it / stick around and you’ll see,” Freer sings, a lyric that captures the tenor of the LP, the balance of the dark and the light. Well of Light might not have ever come to be, if things had gone the way Frame and Mantle expected them to. But they pulled through, and the result is the best music of their career. Stick around and you’ll see.
Disappointing / Average/ Good / Great / Phenomenal
Well of Light is out June 27th.
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Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
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