The Golden Age: Frightened Rabbit’s “The Winter of Mixed Drinks”
*MP3: Frightened Rabbit - “Nothing Like You”
Frightened Rabbit’s third album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, is polished, all right. It’s polishing off the stink and grime of a toxic way of being. It doesn’t all go away in the wash, of course. Every relationship leaves its indelible mark—that unmistakable stain of fear and self-doubt that not even the heaviest dose of Pine Sol can disguise. Winter is the sound of Spring, the sound of a man who has finally ditched the Pine Sol in favor of the open air and open sea.
Scott Hutchinson is right where we left him on The Midnight Organ Fight, swimming out of the Firth of Forth to the cold embrace of the North Sea, swimming until he can’t see land. Not to commit suicide, as he promised not to do in “Floating in the Forth,” but essentially to find himself, or his new self. And so we have the zen cleansing of Winter’s first three tracks. “I didn’t need these things,” Hutchinson says of his baggage on opener “Things,” vowing to shed everything and burn it. He swims a little further. “Are you a man, or are you a bag of sand,” he asks himself in the album’s repeated mantra, reeling strings and guitar figures rising about him, licking away the band’s rough edges. Then “The Loneliness and the Scream,” where the band wails, stomps, and claps away from misery. “All I need is your hand to drag me out again,” Hutchinson sings.
From their the album only increases its epic intent. Hutchinson never quite completely finds release from his pain, but he’s clearly not miserable anymore. In one of the album’s shining Scottish moments, “The Wrestle,” Hutchinson does battle with an unnamed Leviathan of the deep. “My enemy, please stay close to me,” Hutchinson exhorts his foe, brother Grant beating his drums senseless behind him. But then he meets a new girl in “Nothing Like You,” a ripping guitar song that is better for Hutchinson’s new-found confidence. Finally, Hutchinson and co. are “Living in Colour,” dancing and romping around an old-fashioned rock figure, as a gray world melts into new shades of joy around them.
Winter is not as raggedy as its predecessors, which is precisely the point. Hope doesn’t always have to appear in shining white garments, because then it wouldn’t likely be human. The thing that keeps Winter human is Frightened Rabbit’s perpetual scruffiness, its Scottishness, in sound and in ideals. But even a Scottish band should be allowed that ray of hope which sometimes puts a glossier sheen on the rougher elements of life. Sometimes it is a good thing for catharsis to actually happen, because people do dream of actualizing catharsis in their lives, though it rarely happens in such dramatic fashion as it does on this album. I suppose that’s the reason why art exists.
- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz.
