Frightened Rabbit’s ‘Winter’ begets a fruitful summer
Kevin Bronson on
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It’s been six months and thousands of miles of touring since “Scott vs. the Volcano” – a battle that the volcano won but that did little to take the fight out of Scott Hutchison and his bandmates in Frightened Rabbit.
The Scottish quintet was one of several bands marooned in European airports last April thanks to Eyjafjallajökull, the impertinent Icelandic volcano that spewed ash, paralyzed air travel and prevented several acts from making their appointed rounds at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. “You saw the video on YouTube of guy shouting ‘I hate Iceland’? The longer we were sequestered in the hotel, the more I felt like that,” Hutchison says. “We were going out of our minds with cabin fever. It was mind-numbing.”
Freed from those shackles, Hutchison and mates Grant Hutchison, Billy Kennedy, Andy Monaghan and Gordon Skene have spent the year touring tirelessly behind their third album “The Winter of Mixed Drinks,” one of the finest releases of 2010 and a worthy follow-up to the quintet’s 2008 breakthrough “The Midnight Organ Fight.”
Having spent the previous album dissecting relationship woes, Hutchison on the more upbeat “Winter” crafts sonically expansive but emotionally intimate anthems that root around in existential territory – which, the frontman has said, were partly inspired (though never referenced specifically) by the band’s relentless travels: “The only kind of sense of darkness in this record comes from being on tour, lost and drifting.”
Such has been Frightened Rabbit’s recent life, though. Their set in August at Lollapalooza (pictured) drew a huge crowd of passionate (and, thanks to the heat and humidity, sweaty) followers, and they have gone on to play Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, T in the Park and several other festivals, as well as continent-hop whenever given the chance.
“We’ve worked hard and it’s been fantastic, but there’s a long stretch ahead of us,” Hutchison says. “All you can do is give people the live experience – it makes the record more personal.”
Frightened Rabbit also recently nodded to its collaborator Peter Katis, who produced the band’s last two albums, by contributing a track (along with Jonsi, the National and Mercury Rev) to a covers/remixes album saluting Katis’ band the Philistines Jr. The album, “If a Lot of Bands Play in the Woods…?,” will be released next week as a companion disc to the Philistines’ first album in almost a decade (that’s what happens when you’re an A-list producer).
||| Live: Frightened Rabbit does an in-store tonight at Origami Vinyl and headlines the Mayan Theatre on Wednesday.
||| Download: “My Brother Tom, the Green Beret” (Philistines Jr. cover), via Pitchfork.
||| Stream: Three tracks from “The Winter of Mixed Drinks”:
Great write up. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the band over the last couple of months, they couldn’t be a nicer group of guys. It’s really great to see their audience growing from when they played Spaceland a couple years ago.