[Photo: Aforementioned editor reaction to 49ers.] [Yes, we’re talking American sports on a Scottish song. There’s no new Beyonce so what can you do?]
[Video][Website]
[6.46]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Whenever anybody mentions Frightened Rabbit, I always recall the lyricist Scott Hutchison playing outside the Glasgow School of Art for a BBC documentary. He looked up at the camera as it dollied above and beyond, his acoustic performance making sense on the steps of our wonderful institution and lending the building a melancholy tinge. This is a little like that TV moment: a piece of widescreen, poetry-minded confession-core that makes space for its sadness rather than allowing it to overpower the entire track. Despite all this, “The Woodpile” registers more as solid than wonderful, the chorus pointing to a cultish fervency that left me feeling unwelcome at the Church of FR.
[7]
Josh Langhoff: Bereft of all social charms, struck down by the hand of fear, Scott Hutchison may be the most entertaining churl in music. At his best, he combines the Wagnerian anguish of my freshman diary with the anatomical specificity of a drug disclaimer. Here he gives “corner/coroner” the “violins/violence” treatment and dares to have a chat, which he reasonably assumes will lead to self-immolation. The band nobly plays the fire while their rehearsal space collapses around them.
[8]
Brad Shoup: I’m a fan of their burr. But they’re better when they’re more twitchy, and less inclusive.
[5]
Ian Mathers: This is a perfectly good song. It is! And it’s not fair to hold it hostage to another song, but that’s how pop music and humans work. The first time I heard Frightened Rabbit was a song called “The Modern Leper,” which is so intense and melodramatic and self-loathing that it ought to be ridiculous — or rather, ought to be just ridiculous. But somehow, in a really-early-Bright-Eyes way (you know, “A Perfect Sonnet” and such), it hits you like a punch in the stomach, just like the huge whoomps of sound throughout that song — especially if you’re at all in the right/wrong frame of mind. If Frightened Rabbit only sounded like that, it wouldn’t actually work for me (unless I was 17 and single again), but every time I hear this, all I can think is that it sounds a little… uncommitted in comparison. Which is silly. Sorry, Frightened Rabbit.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Their album is called Pedestrian Verse. Study the title and moniker. I suppose it was too much to hope that they’d record a musical adaptation of the great Robert Frost poem, or one without the bluster and ponderousness.
[3]
Ramzi Awn: Frightened Rabbit puts on a nice enough blend of lush guitars and messy vocals. The sound has become a staple for many artists, and it’s a good one — but that doesn’t make it any more innovative.
[6]
Iain Mew: The trudging beats and churning guitars are a good match for the pained vocals and tales of collapsing buildings, I guess. Where I’ve liked these guys in the past it’s been where they’ve pushed gallows humour to the forefront; the album being called Pedestrian Verse suggests they haven’t lost that completely, but there’s not much of it in “The Woodpile”. It could almost be Biffy Clyro at their most boring.
[4]
Jer Fairall: A refreshingly witty miserablist, Scott Hutchison gets that melodrama plays well when it is at least one-third aware of its own ridiculousness, and even better still when backed by a sturdy, ringing tunefulness. The monolithic thud of this track points in the direction of stadium ambitions that weren’t present on the rawer and less assured The Midnight Organ Fight, but the band’s lack of pomp situates this much closer in line with Jimmy Eat World’s buzzing anthems than Mumford and Sons’ humourless jeremiads. If these guys came to represent what Modern Rock radio were to sound like in 2013, in other words, I would be wholly content with that.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: I’ll admit a slight worry about the impending Mumfordization of these folks (though that may just be me suddenly tuning in again after The Midnight Organ Fight and trying to recontextualize), but I’m a sucker for grand anthemic statements like “will you come back to my corner? We’ll speak in our secret tongues.”
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: The loneliness of crowds, disaffection on the dancefloor, finding love in a hopeless place – not exactly original lyrical themes, but fruitful ones, navigated through deftly here. Musically it’s not so much a lit torch to the woodpile, more a Xyloband to the arena, but then a lot of the time, that pays dividends.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: A very good build that features a nice but not too showy conclusion. This gets an extra point because the Scottish accent is so great I’d listen to Frightened Rabbit’s lead man read the video’s YouTube comments just to hear it more.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Significantly less turbulent than Frightened Rabbit has been previously, but “The Woodpile” isn’t any worse for being calmer. The cleaner guitar lines and short, chugging guitar solo push this closer to the indie rock mean, but the band still retains its fatalist romantic swoon, which here takes the form of lovers “trapped in a collapsing building,” with bonus references to an “electric floor” and a “red meat market” (just for extra-gruesome fun, I assume.) And be assured: Scott Hutchison hasn’t tamed his gnarled husk of a Scottish rasp either.
[7]
Anthony Easton: I’m writing this on Burns Day, which might be bigger in Canada than Scotland, when the separatist premier of Quebec is up near Edinburgh talking about Scottish separation being an example for Quebecois one, and wondering about what tradition means in a highly post-national age, and listening to this. Strip the guitar buzz, the abstractness of the music, and listen to the vocals, and the percussion — even listen to the message. There is something folk about this, something that tries to update what Scottish music means, and by extension, what Scottish culture means. The lines about corners and torching woodpiles and secret tongues are the gossip and anxiety of what 2014 might bring.
[9]