Tuesday 29 July 2008

Frigthened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight


Frightened Rabbit’s second album ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ is an album I over looked when it was released but so far this month I’ve been playing it a lot. The Scottish trio released the 14 track record back in April and have since released a couple of singles from it. Critically it has gone done extremely well with Pitchfork and NME both giving it 8/10 and Drowned in Sound giving it a 9/10.

The album is packed full with emotion that is something I notice the more and more I listen to it. You can really hear the pain that is going into some of the lyrics and through the vocals of lead singer Scott Hutchinson you feel his pain. Hutchinson has an amazing voice, it is very raw and his strong Scottish accent also adds to his vocals.

I’d not previously heard anything by Frightened Rabbit so when I first listened to the album I was pretty impressed. Opening song ‘The Modern Leper’ is as raw a song as I’ve heard so far this year and the pain continues with songs like ‘Feel Better’ and ‘Good Arms vs Bad Arms’.

Last single ‘Fast Blood’ is a powerful track and rolls on through the emotion and pain of the lyrics. ‘Old Old Fashioned’ is yet another great 3 minutes 43 seconds of pure bliss. We get an insight into Scott Hutchinson’s relationship in the lyric “I’ll turn off the TV, its killing us, we never speak”.

‘Heads Roll Off’ contains one of my favourite lyrics from the album: “Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name. How come one man got so much fame?” a dig at religion possibly? Either way, I agree. ‘Heads Roll Off’ is fast becoming one of my favourite songs from 2008.

The album is full of other intense songs like next song ‘My Backwards Walk’ and another favourite from my album ‘Keep Yourself Warm’ which deals pretty heavily with relationships including this lyric: “It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm”.

This album has come to me as quite a surprise but I won’t be surprised if it appears in many top 10 of the year lists.

8.5/10

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