Cheap At Half The Price

After Fred Frith's tenure with the bracingly explorative bands Henry Cow and the Art Bears, he made a series of solo albums. After SPEECHLESS and GRAVITY, Frith made this delightful surprise move into his version of pop music. This also marked his first release as vocalist, and he presents himself quite confidently. Very British, his voice falls somewhere between Robert Wyatt and Ivor Cutler, stepping easily between talking and singing. Nearly all of the tracks on this album were home- recorded on a four-track machine, and Frith plays most of the instruments himself.
CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE is a combination of cheerful pop music and Frith's quirkier tendencies. The album opens with the ironic "Some Clouds Don't" (where cheerful harmony singers warn that "some clouds don't have a silver lining"). There are a number of tracks that lean more toward experimental music than toward pop ("Instant Party"). The spirit and sound of this album was revisited later on the French/Frith/Kaiser/Thompson albums.|