Forced the life through still veins

Living In Colour – Frightened Rabbit
Foot Shooter – Frightened Rabbit

The project for the next month is catching up on album reviews I never got around to writing. Today it’s The Winter Of Mixed Drinks from Frightened Rabbit. Their last record was my #2 record of the past decade, so my hopes really couldn’t have been higher. As is usually in the case, the result can only be mixed.

Basically, this is a very nice record, but it just can’t escape from the shadow of something greater. And I mean that in more than the obvious way that it’s the follow-up to a masterpiece. As is often the case for bands not called The Beatles, one brilliant record generates echoes that are keenly felt, as much as they might want to escape them.  The dilemma is thatyYou can’t simply remake the previous record; that would be uninteresting and self-derivative, and the muse never strikes the same way twice. But change is tough, too. So you end up in a twilight space. Occasionally this tension creates something truly amazing (Electro-Shock Blues from Eels strikes me as a great example of this phenomenon), but usually you get something that can’t quite find the right place to settle.

This is compounded by the specificity of the past record.  The Midnight Organ Fight was fundamentally about heartbreak and pain.  It was evocative because of how bitter and caustic and real the sentiment underneath it felt.  And that made the payoffs, the moments of sunshine and warmth feel all the more genuine.  That rock-solid emotional core is absent this time around.  It’s not a happy record, precisely, but it comes from a place of emotional stability and strength.  And that leaves it just a little bit aimless.

The past record hit with so much more force because you always got the sense that the style of each song was driven by some internal necessity.  The songs sounded like they did because they simply couldn’t take any other form.  This time, the album feels more coherent in sonic-sense, but only because some of the particularities that each song ought to evoke are wiped away.  To put it simply: it sometimes sounds like they’re trying to force discontinuous-edged pegs into square holes.  Or, to get even more geeky: these songs ought to sound like irrational numbers, but we’re only hearing them rounded out to integers.

To me that is made most clear on “Living in Colour.”  Not because the song is bad.  In fact, it is without a doubt the best song on the record.  The thing is that it’s almost too good.  By which I mean: it’s stadium rock done by a band that really needs to not let themselves waste their talents being just another stadium rock band.  It’s ridiculously good, no doubt, but you just can’t see how they could possibly improve on this song within the genre.

Of course, all of this is just the necessary preamble to pointing out that, all this notwithstanding, this is a very fine record.  The guitar work is as good as ever–they can do the big jangly parade of fireworks and magic (“Living in Colour”), the bass-driven drunkard’s walk home, full of introspection and false certainty (“The Wrestle”), the gentle edge of dissonance that bookends the slightly bedraggled but resilient core of a song (“Skip the Youth”).  And then there’s “Nothing Like You” which is surely they’re most straightforward rock song, with a wonderfully insistent bass line keeping the whole thing interesting.  The percussion is stellar as well.  Grant Hutchinson’s drum beats always give me a sense that he remains perfectly stationary while the entire rest of the universe is knocked around – it’s one of the defining characteristics of the band, and something that’s on fine display in this go around.

There’s plenty of other good tracks, too.  “Foot Shooter” takes a while to grow on you, but has a deep empathy locked inside.  “Things” doesn’t quite manage to properly establish the calm/stormy balance it’s looking for, but is still quite good.  And “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” provides the counterpoint to “Floating in the Forth” from the previous record.  This time, swimming out is a luxurious possibility, rather than an emotional necessity.  As an independent song, it doesn’t quite carry the risk of loss that is needed to make it work.  But read as an internal dialogue of the band it all fits together well enough.

All of which is to say: even when things don’t work perfectly, this is still a great record.  For all the minor complaints, there’s only one genuine WTF moment, in the form of “Man/Bag Of Sand” which is, as far as I can tell, a re-make of “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” by their untalented nephews or something.  Apart from that, you’ve got a bunch of good songs that lie just on the wrong side of greatness.  Which is still very much worth your time.