Frightened Rabbit

“The Modern Leper“
from the album The Midnight Organ Fight
2008
iTunes

Those lonely emo kids have it easy. They only have to deal with a couple kinds of loneliness: The loneliness of unrequited love and the loneliness of being alone. They ought to count themselves lucky. Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison’s got bigger problems on his hands: Usually it’s that insidious flavor of lonely that comes when you’re with someone and still lonely, sometimes it’s that lonesome feeling you get when your front door shuts behind someone you love for the last time. Unrequited love? Please. That’s for teenagers and soppy romantics. The Midnight Organ Fight is a collection of songs for the painfully, desperately lonely, none of this amateur stuff.

The Scottish band does a great job in couching that desperation inside exquisitely crafted guitar pop, though. With more studio polish on this one than its predecessor, last year’s Sing the Greys, Hutchison’s yearning voice, the band’s slowly building, layered arrangements and its penchant for prodding at the hollow spots between our heart and soul, Frightened Rabbit comes off a little like Snow Patrol might have turned out if it were content to play to diehard music fans in modest sized clubs instead of filling arenas with casual radio listeners. Don’t let that frighten you off. Frightened Rabbit replaces Snow Patrol’s sense of melodrama with a choking honesty and its proclivity to reach toward epic arrangements with a grounding in solid songwriting.

That leaves The Midnight Organ Fight teetering between the joy of a big, bold guitar-pop song and Hutchison’s lonely-heart songwriting. Usually it finds a near-perfect balance. In “The Twist,” a dancer desperately tries to mistake sexual longing for an emotional attachment. He can’t fool himself, though the way the keyboard-based arrangement slowly unfolds, thickening with bass and, eventually guitar, makes the realization a lot easier for, at least, listeners to deal with. In “Keep Yourself Warm,” Hutchison reiterates the same lessons taught by Arab Strap and Hefner years ago: Namely, trying to quench loneliness with drunken hook-ups only feeds the problem; droning keys and sharp guitars eventually explode into a late-in-the-song crescendo that’s half way between the Twilight Sad and Snow Patrol. “My Backwards Walk” and “The Modern Leper” likewise show off Frightened Rabbit’s ability to make a complicated pop song unfold with enough ease to trick your ears into thinking it’s a simple one.

Frightened Rabbit’s just on the cusp of laying things on too thickly on The Midnight Organ Fight. Were it to spin off into lyrical histrionics, let those guitars off their leash to tip at pseudo-grandiose arena riffs, Frightened Rabbit would have gone too far. It never does, leaving a gentle dignity this album — if only Hutchison’s lovelorn characters could find a similar dignity.