Sven Frost
The Last of Us

Sven Frost is a gifted arranger who's spent his life embracing and rationalizing his eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. As a child, he scribbled notes on notebook paper and tin foil squares. He once played an un-powered electric guitar in a band called Fuzz and Fade, and he's been known to record himself playing improvised music.

In the 1980s, he founded his own label, the Frost Record Company, which issued his own self-titled debut, which he re-recorded with a chorus of friends and collaborators (including another member of the Fuzz and Fade band, Timmy D) for the album Frost's “Dream”.

On “The Last of Us”, he's joined by his brother, the late, lamented and misunderstood Tommy, a member of that band who died in 2011. The two men have much in common and they don't wield these skills lightly. They do what they can to limit themselves. There's a palpable sense of purpose in the music here.

The album starts small, with a handful of songs that may not make it past the initial sessions (or, in the case of "The Last of Us", session after session). But Frost's work is a little like a behind-the-scenes documentary, in which the last few minutes reveal the full extent of the work that's been done to make this record.

It becomes easy to forget that Frost has a lot of influences on his own, and even when he starts using happy accident-y repetition to build his structures, it's not easy to resist the temptation to throw in a few more elements. The obvious one would be a gentle synth melody, but he goes for something a little more aggressive, mixing the elements of drone, noise, and the like, sometimes adding in a few more harsh sounds. The title track is especially eerie and striking, and it's where the best parts of “The Last of Us” come in.

As Frost's ideas and inspirations evolve, the album gets more and more in-depth, and when he finally jumps to a vocal or a chorus, it's a huge move. The best moments of The Last of Us are the ones where Frost turns on the charm and gives us an experience that's important. ”I About Condemned" is a killer, and the entire song is a delight, filled with incredible phrasing and a hypnotic tempo. There's something about the way Frost's music sings, and the way it grows and transforms over the course of the song, that makes it so easy to overlook the once-taboo subject matter. But how often do you see a song like that? It's an all-time classic.

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