FRANCES THE MUTE (RED VINYL)

Description

Frances The Mute was not the second part of De-Loused. For one thing, the band’s line-up had changed, in the most painful way. Not long before De-Loused’s release, sound manipulator and founding member Jeremy Michael Ward passed away, a wound Omar says the band never recovered from. But even if his fucking inspiration with sound parameters is absent from Frances The Mute, his spirit and influence can still be determined, the album’s concept derived from a diary Ward had come across in his day job in repossessions. “Jeremy picked up a lot of interesting things when he was a repo man,” Cedric remembers. “Strange things, including this diary, he let us read it a bunch of times. It was by a guy who’d been adopted and was looking to track down his real parents. It was very surreal, it didn’t make a lot of sense – the guy might have been schizophrenic – but it was very inspiring. It was like some music helps you to escape your boring day to day life. Names and scenes from the diary directly inspired these songs. Some of the tracks pre-date De-Loused, having their origins in early demos recorded by Omar at Anikulapo, the duo’s home in Long Beach, songs such as The Widow and Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore. Cedric had heard these jams in their embryonic state and set about figuring out what he could bring to them. “I was drawn to The Widow like you would be to a lover, right?” Cedric remembers. “I sang over it with Omar while we were on the De-Loused tour in Australia at Big Day Out, like, ‘Okay, I’ve got something for this.’”