There’s an electric energy that fills the small, historic dive club in Hollywood, California. It’s not because Rainn Wilson and John Kransinski are there to watch their favorite band. People couldn’t seem to care less. Rather, the packed out, A/C deprived hipster crowd is fixated, their adrenaline hormones haunted by the driving Scottish melodies of Frightened Rabbit, a band whose anthems reverberate idioms like “Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name” and “It takes more than f*cking someone to keep yourself warm.” Behind these spiritual musings and loose proverbs is Frightened Rabbit’s frontman, Scott Hutchinson, a twenty-something son of Scotland whose dabbling in artistry and ability to transmit the melancholy story over crashing symbols and cranked amps have gained him significant attention both in his home country and the US alike.
“I started out as a solo artist,” Scott says, recalling the band’s beginnings. “You can’t even say artist actually. I was really, really bad. It was really difficult to get people to pay attention to what I was doing. So my brother joined on drums and people started paying attention. It was really f*cking loud. But then there was something missing because I was layering things up at home with my recording equipment and I wanted to expand the live sound so Billy joined and started playing a little guitar. By that time our first album, Sing the Greys, was done and we toured that as a 3 piece in Scotland and the US. Then, Midnight Organ Fight was written, produced, and recorded in the US. Andy joined then to flesh out the sound. With the new record we again find ourselves ready to add a new member. He’s going to be joining us when we get back to Scotland.”

When asked to describe Frightened Rabbit’s interwoven landscape of indie, pop, rock, electronica, and folk, Hutchinson confesses, “It’s all by mistake. None of it’s contrived. It’s just, I have bands that I love. I do admit to just taking from here and there but I try to put as much in as possible. The sound of Frightened Rabbit is basically me trying really bad to sound like other bands. One of the nicest things people say about our band is, ‘You know, you’re not really doing anything new but I just can’t put my finger on what makes it so special.’”
While some may argue over their sound reflecting everything from The Frames to Snow Patrol to Death Cab to Weezer, The band’s loyalty to Scottish folk tradition and storytelling carries an unwavering and undeniable current that sweeps across the breadth of their musical landscape. “At the core of everything there’s always a song,” says Scott. “And the song structure remains traditional, even with the new record we just finished over the summer, the arrangements are a little more experimental, but still at the core there is a song and that for me is what ties us back to folk, what ties us back to Scotland… the fact that it’s really important to have this melody and something to say.”
Hutchinson is true to his convictions. The lyrics of Frightened Rabbit are rarely without “something to say.” In a society of authorities that seem indifferent to doubts and uncertainties, bands like Frighten Rabbit resonate with a post-modern, question-driven culture. Hutchinson’s lyrics don’t wrap up and don’t play down…they brood, they muse, they challenge in a manner that would provoke anyone to ask big questions about the role relationships, sexuality, and religion play out in their life.
Their most recent album, Midnight Organ Fight exploded in the US as part break-up album, part existential excursion. On “Head Rolls Off,” Hutchinson denounces Christ as any sort of deity and wonders “How come one man got so much fame?” “Head Rolls Off” is my thesis for spirituality, Hutchinson explains. “It comes back again on the new record. I love using religious imagery in my songs because it’s really amongst the most powerful imagery that we have as lyricists. It’s a huge part of Scottish life as well – religious tension has shaped the way our country has come to be. I love using it but I don’t want it to be mistaken for actually believing in it. So in that sense I like to use it perhaps to display just how pointless I feel it is sometimes. Because we’re just alive and then we’re dead. That’s as simple as it is to me: You’re alive and then you’re dead. It can happen at any point in time. All you have to do is something while you’re alive because there’s no opportunity to do it after.”
That theme reaches its peak on Midnight Organ Flight with its blunt ballad “Keep Yourself Warm,” a song that begs for life to move beyond the superficial pleasures of screwing around and asks the forthright yet sincere question, “Do you really think you’ll find love in a hole?” “That one’s not about me so much,” Hutchinson says, his eyes lighting up as if about to tell another Scottish folk story. “I wrote that one about a couple of friends of mine that were having different experiences. One of them, alright, was f*cking around and there was nothing in it and he just wasn’t happy. No matter how much he complained and complained about it, he’d go back and do it again. I’d just be like ‘man, come on.’ Then there was the other guy who was doing nothing: sleeping in until 4, not actually meeting anyone. So there are these two aspects of that song whereby one is quite clearly…‘the hole’ [laughs] and the other one is “the hole,” as in, ‘you’re stuck in a rut and you can’t get out of it.’ Maybe they’re both kind of like that because they’re both a place where nothing productive is being done and you’re not really advancing yourself as a person or helping anything.
Frightened Rabbit’s new album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, is streaming on their myspace now and releases world-wide next month. The album promises to break apart the band’s traditional rock band mentality and surprise even close fans of the group. Says Hutchinson, “The new record is really layered. With the last one, there were a lot of things missing that I really wanted to be in there that I didn’t have time to do. This time I think I went purposely overboard and we pulled it back in the mix. We’ve also got a new member who’s going to be joining us when we get back to Scotland. Hopefully he’ll be able to add those elements from the new record live. He’s going to play a bunch of everything. We have a lot sampled, we have more interestingly layered drum sounds…we’re not trying to use the kit as much. There are a few easily identifiable Frightened Rabbit tunes that could have easily cropped up on the last one but this new one is very much disregarding the four piece guitar band attitude that we had at the time of doing Midnight Organ Fight. “
Whether or not Frightened Rabbit’s new record departs too much from their former sound in the opinion of American hipsters is currently up for debate. What is resolute is the underground phenomenon this band of Scots has created, seizing the attention of indie college-something culture by its skinny jeans.
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