With four worn out limbs and not one love song

The Oil Slick – Frightened Rabbit
Dead Now – Frightened Rabbit

On their fourth album, Frightened Rabbit hit many of the same notes we’ve come to expect from them.  But Pedestrian Verse is certainly not a simple repetition.  As much as I would love to get another Midnight Organ Fight from them, they have perhaps wisely recognized that the soul can only be bared so completely once.  Their last record (2010’s Winter of Mixed Drinks) attempted to break the mold by going big: huge anthemic rock to heal the fractured soul.  It worked in parts, but never quite felt natural.

This time around, they have backed off the big-for-its-own sake ethos. Which is not to say this is a quiet album.  It’s just that when they go big (Backyard Skulls, Holy, Late March Death March) it feels a lot more organic.  These songs are propulsive, maybe even a little violent.  But it’s violence for a purpose.  If Midnight Organ Fight was a record about the intense subjectivity of pain – the way that it feels utterly unique and impossible to share – this album is far more about anger.

The fundamental sense of self-loathing that runs through all their work is still here. See, for example, The Oil Slick or Dead Now.  But it increasingly feels less like ‘loathing’ and more like the painful struggle of coming to terms with all the ways that we can never quite be the best version of ourselves.  And that feeling, for all its intense sadness, invites a degree of empathy.  As you struggle to find a place in the world, you can’t help but realize that everyone else is doing the same thing.

The result is an album about social pain, as opposed to an album about emotional pain.  It’s cathartic – not in the sense of offering release from the demons that trouble us, but in the way that it lets us perceive things in a new light.  Again, see Dead Now, which closes with an emphatic, almost joyful repetition of the line “there’s something wrong with me.”  There’s a kind of wry self-awareness on display here.  It’s less rending, and can’t quite reach the same impossible heights that they’ve scaled before, but it’s tremendously heartening nonetheless.  For all the great music on their first three records, I have worried about this band’s long-term viability.  There’s only so long you can sing about depression and girls without risking some serious self-plagiarism.  But this album shows that the Brothers Hutchinson have a whole lot more to say.

In fact, I’m tentatively ready to declare them a serious challenger for the title of best band on the planet right now.  Though, we’ll have to wait until September when the new Okkervil River comes out to say for sure…