Review of The Midnight Organ Fight Album by Frightened Rabbit

Frightened Rabbit
The Midnight Organ Fight
Fat Cat
Album Review

Frightened Rabbit The Midnight Organ Fight Album

Halfway through the record, Scott Hutchison announces 'Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name' and 'Bright Pink Bookmark' is kicked into life. Welcome, folks, to the world of Frightened Rabbit, a band whose lyrics eschew the stereotypical view of Glaswegian existence as a dour stain on the British landscape. However, don't switch off just yet, as it's not the subject matter we should be concentrating on here, but the way they tell it.

Eighteen months after the initial release of their first record 'Sing The Greys', an album that was essentially a collection of demos that got them signed to Fat Cat in the first place welded together by the odd looped interlude here and there, Frightened Rabbit have returned with album number two, their first proper full-length recording that was intended for the purpose of being an album, and whisper it quietly, but they might just have given us one of 2008's first gems.

Although now a four-piece, Frightened Rabbit were only a trio when they headed off to the States to record 'Midnight Organ Fight' with esteemed producer Peter Katis ('Turn On The Bright Lights' and 'The Boxer' to name but two of his previous works), and it would be fair to say that much of the creative input, certainly around the lyrical themes and song structures themselves result from the Hutchison brothers, whose tales of woe and misery and more woe actually seem quite life-affirming in a perverse kind of way.

If anything, 'Midnight Organ Fight' is musically less taut than its predecessor, which sometimes favoured the frantic over simply letting the songs flow themselves. What this means is that the initial Biffy Clyro comparisons that filtered through after 'Sing The Greys' have now given way to.please don't switch off..a more exquisite, and distinctly vitriolic take on what Snow Patrol seem to have achieved in their field, otherwise known as left-field commercial pop.

You see, that's the big thing about 'Midnight Organ Fight'; it is a POP record in the same way that 'Funeral' or 'Parallel Lines' are pop records, and once the realisation hits home for both Frightened Rabbit and their suitors, the UK music mediums of television and radio could be in a much healthier state indeed.

Heart-warming, in the most awkward sense of the word.

4/5
Dom Gourlay


Site - http://www.frightenedrabbit.com

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