I felt extremely isolated… Myself and my girlfriend had kind of made a very unhealthy island for ourselves whereby we were just sort of this protected unit that was too close.” His life became claustrophobic, smaller within the sprawl of Los Angeles than it was back home. “I was living in a place I didn’t want to be in. That year and a half contained “some of the darkest and brightest moments of my life,” he says cheerily before focusing almost entirely on the darkness. In that time he left Scotland for Los Angeles to move in with his girlfriend, only to find himself in the midst of a crumbling relationship in a sunny city that he’d come to loathe. “Sometimes there's just a desire… to not be the guy who writes about relationships,” says Hutchison, who started the band as a solo project in 2003, “but for better or worse, actually, it's why I started writing songs.” Either way the last two years left Hutchison with little choice. At no point does Hutchison circle back round and laugh at the bleak picture.ĭespite Hutchison’s initial efforts, it is, like Pedestrian Verse and 2008’s The Midnight Organ Fight before it, and album about a breakup. Frightened Rabbit’s new album, out tomorrow, is called Painting of a Panic Attack and it opens with a track called “Death Dream” in which a distant organ and spare piano refuse every ounce of positivity that “The Oil Slick” drew from. It is not called Woke Up Happy, and Hutchison spends no time telling the listener that everything’s going to be all right. “That was a wee joke.”īut there are no birds chirping in the introduction to Frightened Rabbit’s new album. “Yeah,” says Hutchison now in his thick Scottish drawl, a small smile breaking across his face. The comedy didn’t just come from the song’s initial self-loathing it ended with birds chirping. “We’ve still got hope, so I think we’ll be fine,” he sang, his voice in its upper reaches. First the optimism came with caveats-“There is light but there’s a tunnel to crawl through / There is love but misery loves you”-but eventually it boiled down to the closest they’d get to an affirmation. The track teetered on the edge of self-loathing until its conclusion when, for the first time, Hutchison broke the fourth wall and addressed his audience. It was musically bright and sardonic, full of playful guitars and rising, affirmative open chords to accompany the self-referential, mocking lyrics: “Only an idiot would swim through all the shit I write,” sang Hutchison, taking his own bleak outlook to task. Take “The Oil Slick,” the final track on the band’s 2013 LP Pedestrian Verse, a track that bled reluctant optimism from each of its fresh cuts. On their four studio albums since debut LP Sing The Greys in 2006, they’ve developed a reputation for morose introspection-and made a habit of poking fun at the sincerity with bone-dry humor wherever possible. It’s a relief to hear Frightened Rabbit mocking their own cynicism again. Woke Up Happy in a Park With a Picnic Right Next to Me.” With a deadpan monotone concealing his perverse glee, lead singer Scott Hutchison joins in: “ Woke Up Happy, yeah. “It should really be called Woke Up Happy,” suggests Frightened Rabbit guitarist Andy Monaghan of the band’s emotionally fraught new LP.
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