Frightened Rabbit @ Johnny Brenda's
By: C.T. Heaney
Posted: Jan. 21, 2009 – Philadelphia, US
A bitter wind blew across the snowless Philadelphia wasteland on this frozen Friday night; Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison would remark later in the evening that it was so cold he "couldn't feel [his] own fucking nose", which is high praise, coming from a Glaswegian.
Warming up the early birds was first opener Right On Dynamite, who led off with a set of serviceable, but rather unremarkable indie rock, landing somewhere between Pavement and The Secret Machines. The second openers were locals Arc in Round (formerly known as Relay), whose excellent suite of heavy, gooey shoegaze featured both male and female vocals, as well as guitars so drenched in reverb the keyboards were barely audible. The results stacked up favorably against the likes of Lush, Secret Shine, and February.
While I was taking in Arc in Round's performance, four short, shaggy fellows nudged in through the crowd and stood roughly in a circle around me. It took a short while for me to realize these were the same men who would soon take the stage as the night's chief attraction. It was a telling moment – few bands would consider joining the crowd to watch the openers at their own sold-out show. Such a choice marks the band members as both extraordinarily humble and indefatigably curious; it requires both grace and patience to deal with a crowd that, inevitably, tried to chat up the Rabbits rather than watch the band onstage.
By the end of Arc in Round's set, the venue had become noticeably short of space; tiny Johnny Brenda's was quite possibly overbooked with Frightened fans. The group took the stage to a storm of applause and kicked off with "The Modern Leper", the leadoff track from their most recent album. The set hewed mostly to newer songs, with only a couple of tunes from their debut making the cut toward the end of the show. Frightened Rabbit's albums are fairly stripped-down affairs, and re-creating them live is not, in theory, difficult. The question is whether the group would be able to retain the energy of those albums – and in this they did not disappoint.
Nearly every song of the evening built to thundering crescendo by its end, each member hammering his guitar (with brother Grant doing the same on the drums) as Hutchison brought his Proclaimers brogue to a shout for the final chorus time and again; "Fast Blood", "The Twist", "Square 9". Those that didn't, had their own endearing quirks – "The Greys" was slowed down to a loping dance, and "Poke" appeared as an unplugged, Hutchison-only encore done at the front of the stage. His expression changed little during the set, wide-eyed, mouth slightly agape, dripping with sweat. His face was inscrutable, but not devoid of emotion; instead of changing his countenance in response to the lyrics, he stared off in reverie, seemingly entranced by the force of the group's own sound.
It's manifest why they're the kind of band one would expect to be out in the crowd before their own set. Many of their songs are built around the same basic harmonies and chord progressions, imbuing them with a charming folk simplicity, while their bare, fiery performance technique evinces post-punk spit and bravado. The organ washes and pealing underpinnings heard on the record are, in an impressive economy of sound, translated into sparse keyboard accompaniment, manic strumming and weighty backing vocals in the live show. It is truly rare, and therefore stunning, to listen to a band do so much with so little. The lyrics are pointedly personal and often unexpectedly direct; when Hutchison sings "It takes more than fucking someone you don't know to keep warm", as he did in the last song of the evening, you know he's speaking from experience. He knows well that the crowd will want to sing with him, because it's their experience, too.
This is the sound of hearts laid bare and veins split open, but not for the sake of self-pity or attention-seeking. Catharsis of the kind Frightened Rabbit practices – and it is catharsis, as Hutchison based nearly all of the lyrics on their most recent album, Midnight Organ Fight, around a breakup – isn't about wallowing. It's about breaking with the worst of the past and bracing for what comes next, with the hope that it will be better, but the wisdom to know that it might not. "I think I'll save suicide for another day", indeed.
Video: "The Greys" by Frightened Rabbit
