Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The concept album may be one that sits with highly prized satisfaction in the realms of Progressive Rock and even in the hearts of some of its heavier cousins and the beautifully placed arrangements that Classical holds without alluding to the term, yet in the hands of the imaginative and the bold, it can be just as sublime, just as terrifyingly simple to achieve the desired effect. For the Mono Sideboards, The Pains of Being Frank Lamb is a concept that all can identify with and can empathise totally.

The album sits comfortably against another that takes the same passionate and progressive steps as The Small Faces in the second half of their incredible album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake and whilst perhaps unfairly there will be those that suggest the most underrated band arguably of British music history should not even be mentioned in the same vein as an upcoming band from the city of perpetual culture, the comparisons are there to be heard in the way the story is freshly presented and musically adapted.

The Mono Sideboards have captured something very real in the release of The Pains of Being Frank Lamb, the art of pathos and understanding not lost upon the listener and as tracks such as Frank’s Lament, the utterly compelling and heartbreaking simplicity of For Laura in the Morning, Speaker for the Dead and Sun in our Eyes grow with each passing phase of movement, a story comes together that really grabs the attention and asks the listener to delve deeper beyond their own conceptions.

The cautionary tale, the placing of one’s own life into the shoes of someone else’s experience is never to be taken for granted, nor should it ever stop people from feeling the empathy and in many cases beauty, that such an encounters should bring, for The Mono Sideboards they have truly captured that familiarity and it is one to savour with empathy in the heart and the wry smile of musical contentment firmly placed in the smile upon one’s face.

Ian D. Hall