Sub Pop Records

If, as the Carter Family song goes, it takes a worried man to sing a worried song, does it follow that it takes a paranoid man to sing a paranoid song? As you listen to Black Forest, the A Frames’ third record and their first for Sub Pop, you’re left to reckon so. “Worried Man Blues,” a traditional folk song first recorded in 1930 by the country/bluegrass pioneers, is about a man waking up with shackles on his feet: “twenty-nine links of chain around his legs,” while this record’s title track tells about the steady-but-sudden jolt of de-evolution: “no organism left to grow/Black Forest and fall-out snow.” The Carter Family recording became a standard on Depression-era radio; A Frames songs afflict the art-minded online forum hounds of the Over-Information Age”which, I’m sure we can all agree, is starting to look more and more like the Depression every day. That such an admittedly odd association can be made so aptly drawn across an expanse of time and place serves to cement the idea that the A Frames are timeless. While referencing the darkest days of the past, they are miles in front of the future.

As much sense as it makes to construct an analogy between Dust Bowl pioneers and Digital Age dissidents, however, the highly singular sound of the A Frames is best understood through, well, its own frame. Having each cut their musical teeth many years prior on bands like Cows, Butthole Surfers, and Scratch Acid, the three-piece formed in Seattle during the late ‘90s and began collectively designing their own brand of stripped-down neo-modern experimental noise. Beginning with the band’s 2002 lo-fi/post-punk self-titled debut (released in tandem by…