Frightened Rabbit – The Winter Of Mixed Drinks
Frightened Rabbit - The Winter Of Mixed Drinks
There is every reason for Frightened Rabbit to be triumphant. After two critically well received albums they teeter on the edge of the mainstream, while Glasvegas, the band they are likely to be erroneously compared to have proven themselves exactly as good as you would expect of a group hyped by today’s Alan McGee and today’s NME; right up there with date-rape and bowel cancer.
Adding members at such a rate they should be approaching Los Campesinos! in terms of stage-filling ability this time next year, Frightened Rabbit’s sound has been expanding appropriately. Their new LP, The Winter of Mixed Drinks kicks off with ‘Things,’ a thudding behemoth of a song which swells and reaches upward ad infinitum like an ancient stone fist.
And there is an ancient quality to the album – if you liked the ho down atmosphere provided by mandolin and folk dance rhythm on the last record’s only excursion into cheeriness, ‘Old Old Fashioned’, you’ll enjoy a lot of the similarly twinkly, strummy, handclappy textures present here. Case in point: ‘The Loneliness and the Scream’, which is far, far, jollier than the title would suggest.
In fact, the whole album could be summed up in that previous sentence – Leonard Cohen said on his recent tour that despite “studying deeply in the philosophies and religions…cheerfulness kept breaking through”. Well cheerfulness has not only broken through here, it has completely eviscerated the melancholy that the band previously wielded like a hammer to the chest. Indeed, the album seems to be perfectly (and as a man exactly as cynical as I could add, consciously) designed to be hammered out from festival stages. The Winter of Mixed Drinks? More like the summer of pear cider.
Which is, perhaps just to mopey old me, a bit of a problem. It’s like having a friend who got you through your darkest times by always being slightly worse off than you – you’d been dumped, they’d been stabbed by their ex-girlfriend – who is now engaged to the man/woman/manwoman of their dreams. You don’t resent their happiness, but you can’t quite find it in your heart to be completely 100% happy for them either.
It doesn’t help that they drop the ball themselves occasionally, either. ‘Nothing Like You’ should be one of the best pop songs they’ve created, right up there with ‘The Twist’, but the song demonstrates its ill-fittedness for the band by forcing Scott Hutchison to sings in a much higher register than suits him and ends up sounding strangled, in a decidedly not good way. Add in the patently laughable key lyric “She was not the cure for cancer/and all my questions still ask for answers” and you’re left wondering if this really is the same band who used to hold your hand and scream into the void for you.
Still, lead single ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’ is, despite copping the central conceit from British Sea Power’s superior ‘Fear of Drowning’, excellent and ‘Living in Colour’ hits all the right anthemic notes without feeling forced.
Overall, this album leaves me wondering whether if Frightened Rabbit have really changed for the worse or whether it’s just a personal preference for misery that leaves me feeling a bit cold and exhausted by the perpetual triumphalism of Winter of Mixed Drinks. My sneaking suspicion is there’s a smidgeon of the latter, but a huge wedge of the former, which is a real shame. Still, I’m happy for them. I really am. But if they want someone to bitch about ex girlfriends and the bad old times with, I’m right here, waiting for my old friends to come back.
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