Caught in the Carousel

Frightened Rabbit

Winter of Mixed Drinks
Fat Cat

Frightened Rabbit

"One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become," Sartre once wrote. "One lives one's death, one dies one's life." For Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison this appears to be a sentiment he's both wrestling with and resigned to. But on top of that, he's wresting with the wrestling and he's wrestling with the resignation, and that, my friends, is hard work.

On his band's third long player, The Winter Of Mixed Drinks Hutchison grapples with existence, non-existence, and all the what-will-all-this-mean-when-I'm-gone kind of stuff in between. On the face of it, this kind of subject matter in song has the potential of lapsing into navel-gazing overdrive, but in the hands of Hutchison it's generative of such acute emotional tension, the result is an open wound of an album devoid of self-indulgent nonsense.

And so the songs.

Beginning with a splash of organ, the aching opener "Things" finds the head rabbit struggling for meaning: "Here is evidence of human existence/A splitting binbag next to two damp boxes/I cannot find a name for them/They hardly show that I have lived." Delivered just short of a wrenching sob, "Things" is a slow burning triumph. Hutchison's voice is soaked in throbbing sincerity and when he laments, "I didn't need these things/I didn't need them," he sounds like a man who fears he's gone too far. It might be a risk to set the table with such anguish, but Hutchison is a man who's scuffling with the big questions, so this gambit makes perfect sense.

Oddly, for one who is concerned with what happens when we're gone, "Swim Until You Can't See Land" seems to invite or hasten oblivion, even challenging it ("Are you a man/Are you a bag of sand?") while the Idlewild-influenced "The Loneliness And The Scream" finds Hutchison looking for corporeal, Descartes-ian assurance: "In the loneliness/Oh the loneliness/And the scream to prove to everyone that I exist." Later, the blistering "Skip The Youth" finds the singer railing against juvenescence: "If this is the prime of life/I Wish I could skip the blasted youth," while later on "Foot Shooter" he advises, "Better go outside/Sit in your boat and wait/'Til you get washed away."

The aforementioned lot are difficult numbers in that along with the grimness of it all, the hooks are hard fought, but they are there, lurking under the album's textured musical architecture. The arrangements are layered with chiming guitars, drums that rise and fall and organs that ring out, sonar-like, from the deep black of oblivion.

But out of that oblivion comes some pretty great pop music: "Yes, I Would" is a falsetto- laced beauty that swirls slowly with a melodious ease and "Living In Colour" is the album's undisputed high point. As positively soaring as Echo and the Bunnymen's "The Cutter" and as catchy as anything Oasis could have ever dreamed of, "Living In Colour" reaches the kind of majestic pop heights that are so exhilarating, by its end, one can only be left holding their side and wondering where their balance went. Yes, it's that good. Redemptive, exuberant and managing an explosive pop rush, this, I feel very safe in saying, is the song of the year.

Although it may not be the album of the year, The Winter Of Mixed Drinks a defining effort that asserts Frightened Rabbit are not interested in the easy road. This is a deeply talented band, but they'd rather hack at the brush than coast on the clear path and that's an admirable trait. A study of existence and oblivion and the ensuing claustrophobia that comes when one faces the fact that they're stuck between the two, this is a hefty, often brutal cocktail, but the buzz is worth the work it takes to drink it down.

—Alex Green