In Frightened Rabbit's breakout second LP, The Midnight Organ Fight, frontman and songwriter Scott Hutchison confessed his struggles with depression and alcoholism in, to use his language, "brutal" and "oppressive" detail. For all its glumness, though, The Midnight Organ Fight is still a remarkably honest, exciting album; its combination of earnest vocals, dire subject matter, and propulsive folk-pop reminded me of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, only without some of the consistency and nuances of design and theme that made that album so singularly great. To invite the comparison at all is about as high a compliment as I can pay a record.
Having said that, I think that The Winter of Mixed Drinks, Frightened Rabbit's 2010 follow-up, is even better. Give the record's first four tracks -- its best -- a listen; if you're not hooked, then I don't think I want to know you. The band, centered around Scott Hutchison and his brother Grant on drums, expanded its sound considerably from The Midnight Organ Fight, which leaned a little more heavily on the folk part of the folk-pop equation. The addition of Make Model's Gordon Skene, along with Scott Hutchison's changing sensibilities, help weigh Winter decidedly in the opposite direction; even with the added shoegaze elements and the percussive stomp from the band's roots in Scottish folk, each one of those first four songs is unabashed, anthemic pop.
Accompanying a somewhat more accessible musical style is a relatively more optimistic outlook on life. The Midnight Organ Fight was a breakup album in the vein of Beck's Sea Change, a remarkably detailed look at Hutchison's misery from beginning to end. The Winter of Mixed Drinks listens like a self-help record by comparison; the dominant theme of The Midnight Organ Fight was trying to understand or to even accept pain, and The Winter of Mixed Drinks, with its nautical imagery, is about fighting it. "Swim Until You Can't See Land" is about an act of desperation as much as anything else; the narrator has to take to the sea lest his myriad worries back home overtake him. Sure, he might drown (as the reprise "Man/Bag of Sand" implies) but at least he's given himself a fighting chance.
No, The Winter of Mixed Drinks couldn't be called a happy album, but it is, relatively speaking, optimistic. "Nothing Like You" and "Living in Colour" detail more practical ways of getting over the breakup that spurred on The Midnight Organ Fight: new relationships. "Foot Shooter" is a hopeful anthem (go figure) about how to get past the drunken fights that sunk Hutchison's relationships past. As the album's subdued conclusion, "Yes I Would," notes: even though "the loss of a lonely man never makes much of a sound...I just can't sink now." Compared to the gloomy reflection of I See a Darkness, the despairing anger of The Moon and Antarctica, and the childlike escapism of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, that's downright uplifting.
The album does have a few flaws; a song or two in its middle, especially the inelegant "Skip the Youth," are somewhat forgettable. Perhaps more notably, the pop transition comes saddled with a bit of overproduction, and that sonic cleanliness is kind of jarring after the raw sound of the band's last record. But unlike Pitchfork, I don't think that the change in sound has cost the band anything in terms of authenticity; Frightened Rabbit is still on a par with -- or even surpasses -- Arcade Fire and TV On the Radio in terms of emotional resonance.
Grade: A
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