FRIGHTENED
RABBIT – midnight organ fight
(CD/download
– Fat Cat)
Sometimes I don’t know if what I am doing with my
life is right or wrong. The various alternatives are in the future or
shrouded in fog and I can’t see clear what is ahead, yet I have to decide
to walk on, because, after all, treading water, is no choice as well. And
then I spend an amount of time thinking back at the years past, wondering
where they went and remembering times that in memory seem a lot better to me
than they probably were, yet still seem so much easier and simpler. Mostly
because all the decision before me then are behind me now.
Most of the times I am quite sure that walking ahead,
head upright and with a positive stride, is the right thing to do, but
sometimes, you know, sometimes this facade vanishes and I see clearly that
there is so much else in this world, so much I cannot control. Then a
feeling of insecurity and immediacy creeps up on me and makes me pull out
old records and old band t-shirts (Primal Scream before they went disco or death to
the Pixies...) and I try out imagining what life would be if it would still
be like back then. End of the Eighties, early Nineties – probably my best
time of life. But I know it is all nostalgia and make believe and after some
time I turn back to the current day, regain my strength and keep on walking.
The voice of the singer of Frightened Rabbit keeps that
fuzzy line between stating with belief and attitude and an insecure tremble
that betrays his insecurity. “I am armed with the past, with the will and
a brick / I might not want you back but I want to kill him” he sings and
then takes it all back. Or that fucking anybody who is available won’t
help you to get over that broken love, won’t fill the hole that has been
ripped into your heart. But that tremble in his voice says: Who knows, maybe
it will? Here I am, ready to do the same mistake all over again. I’ll take
the chance and I’ll decide next morning if it was the mistake I already
know it is. “I am drunk and you are probably on pills” the singer adds
to put flavour and realism to the story.
In the meantime the instruments lay down a dense and
driving layer of alternative indie pop that is distorted enough to spark
with immediacy. And it is becoming more and more dense and rigid, more
distorted and more insisting. Right now, the music pounds out in the back,
right here and now is live, don’t wait any longer. Drums, bass, an
acoustic guitar and a distorted electric one make for everything you hear on
here mostly, but it is enough to get to the point. The only other band I
know that has closely managed the same mixture of immediacy in the loudest
and most distorted variety of indie pop with an introverted singer who
whines and winds around at the front were Wedding Present. They also had the
same effect that at first you thought that this is nice, loud alternative
pop music and then they hit you around the ears with an iron beam when you
realised what they were singing about. If that comparison doesn’t show you
that I am as old as I hinted at above, I don’t know what else will.
“Let’s get old fashioned, back to how things used to be”, right, this
band is probably as old as me.
It is definitely not easy to write and arrange songs
like these. They are not so much about rehearsing but of getting into the
right attitude, to feel the recklessness of building up a big wall of noise
on stage while not losing the sensibility necessary to remain in a pop
realm. Better not mention Joy Divison, even if there are songs as sparsely
and with a melodic bass line on here, but there is none of the coldness and
the bleakness ringing in every existentialist note of Joy Divison.
Frightened Rabbit are shocked and shivering, angry and aggravated, and ready
to scream and kick even knowing quite well about the futility of these
efforts. This music is not a cry for help, but a yelp for a complete change.
After all, what is better than to become old together?
