8 / 10
Destiny calls at the strangest moments. The zeitgeist having deserted them, Cork's Frank & 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.
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