From the heart: from left, Andy Monaghan, Grant Hutchison, Scott Hutchison and Billy Kennedy say their new album has an 'organ-y, bodily function theme' to it
THE first time I saw the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, it was at the 2007 SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. Lead singer and guitarist Scott Hutchison was introducing himself to America by assaulting a sweet-filled rabbit piñata with a stick and, having decapitated the beast, distributing the candy innards to the bemused crowd. It was an unorthodox approach to marketing but one which paid dividends with a series of sold-out American gigs and a fervent US following. On the eve of releasing their second album, Midnight Organ Fight, that American success could be poised to cross the Atlantic.
"I don't know if we can put it solely down to the piñata but stuff like that helps," deadpans Scott of Frightened Rabbit's American popularity.
Comprising Scott, his brother Grant on drums, along with Andy Monaghan on bass and Billy Kennedy on second guitar, Frightened Rabbit began life as a hobby band for the singer. Their first album, Sing The Greys, was a happy accident, a series of songs that Scott wrote while a student at Glasgow School of Art. They were never intended to form an album but demos of the songs were released as an album after protracted record company wranglings. Grounded in the emotional, story-telling ethos of folk music but delivered in a tense, often confrontational squall of noise, it earned the band numerous tags as one to watch. They look as though they are going to make good on that promise with Midnight Organ Fight, which was recorded in Connecticut with Peter Katis, the producer responsible for albums by Mercury Rev, The National and Interpol.
"Peter brought a sense of atmosphere that perhaps wasn't in the first set of recordings," says Scott of the new album. "He makes quite dark, brooding records and there is some of that in the record. I did learn a lot from recording with him. I tend to go all out and just shove things in the mix and keep piling stuff on. He taught us to hold back from time to time so you can bring a greater effect to the moments that really do kick in."
Midnight Organ Fight is a more coherent album than the first, not least because it was written to tight deadlines. "The first album was written over four years while I was at university," explains Scott. "That's a long time to write six or seven songs. The majority of this one was written within three weeks to a month and it was demo-ed in that time as well. It was a more cohesive set of songs and then the recording of it was much more intense with 12-hour days, sometimes more. It was a much more intense experience. The songs themselves have a very similar theme because they were written at the same time. They have a sense of a time and place."
That time and place might not have been the happiest to judge from some of the songs. 'Floating In The Forth' finds the narrator imagining suicide. The album's cover, featuring a dismantled heart, was the fruit of Scott's illustration degree and it has a similarly bleak tone.
"It's an exploding heart," he says. "The whole album has an organ-y, bodily function theme to it. There is blood and death going on there. I've been drawing organs for a while. When I was at uni, there were a couple of tutors who I played early demos to and they said that my work resembles my music. That's another reason why I wanted to do the cover myself rather than get someone to Photoshop something fancy: it's about the consistency of vision."
All this talk of blood, death and exploding organs might not make Frightened Rabbit sound the most jolly of bands, but it is not all earnest gloom and doom. As befits a band who covered N-Trance's 'Set You Free', there is a black sense of humour at work in Scott's songs. Inspired by artists such as James Brown and Sufjan Stevens writing whole albums of Christmas songs, last December Frightened Rabbit released a downbeat track called 'It's Christmas So We'll Stop'. Scott had intended to do an entire album but swiftly realised that he "only had one song of Christmas in me. I'm working on one about Boxing Day now though so maybe I will do that."
"Nick Cave has a lovely sense of humour with his darkness and I try and get that as well," says Scott. "It's the same with Morrissey and the other lyricists I admire. I always try and keep a sense of that laconic humour without it becoming stupid and infantile. The humour always takes the edge off the bleak stuff."
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Midnight Organ Fight is released April 14. Frightened Rabbit play Snafu, Aberdeen, Thursday; Mono, Glasgow, April 14; Green Room Venue, Edinburgh, April 20 •
www.myspace.com/frightenedrabbitThe full article contains 842 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
