When Hutchison says that he was inside the turmoil, he means it in its most literal sense. Hutchison’s lyrics almost entirely do away with comedy, choosing instead to stare continuously at the discomfort he creates, inspecting each of its crooked corners and pulling it apart with tweezers. Nobody is afraid to talk about the fact that Painting of a Panic Attack is Frightened Rabbit’s darkest and most challenging record yet-no mean feat for a band that has prided itself on that aesthetic. His brother Grant, the band’s drummer and next longest-serving member, leans forward while Scott falls back into the couch, considering every line that his bandmates offer up. Like his bandmates he’s engaging and thoughtful, keen to hear my take on the record before offering up his own. Hutchison-a four-day beard around his jaw-seems at odds with the anxious introvert that comes through on the record. Sitting in Atlantic Records’ midtown offices, midday sun blaring through the windows, the band are at complete ease with each other, turning answers into punchlines and finishing each other’s sentences. After 18 months, he called it quits: the relationship wound down, and he found himself back in Scotland with Panic Attack in its final stages. 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.
#Lyrics death dream frightened rabbit full#
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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