"It takes more than fucking someone you don't know
to keep warm," sings Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison on "Keep
Yourself Warm," and it sounds like resignation as well as a grand statement of
purpose. It's the emotional apex of the Scottish band's dark, terrific second
album, which circles the drain of failed relationships and bad sex—and
somehow finds sparks of hope in mountains of crushing hopelessness. (Think a
slightly sunnier version of Arab Strap, another pack of dour Scots.) Supposedly
inspired by a particularly harsh breakup, The Midnight Organ Fight finds Hutchison longing
folkishly for better times (the jangling "Old Old Fashioned"), then
considering—but ultimately dismissing—suicide ("Floating In The
Forth"). On "Poke," he suggests this method for dealing with a failed
relationship: "Should we kick its cunt in / and watch as it dies from
bleeding?" It's all dressed in familiar-sounding indie-rock, with bits of
Sebadoh, The Long Winters, and early U2 providing the road map. But it's
Hutchison's utterly believable desperation and frank lyrics that push the whole
thing from good to great. It doesn't make for easy listening, but nothing this
flatly honest and powerful ever is.
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