Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse

"Sounds like a celebration and reads like a eulogy..."

I wrote this ages ago, and the record's been out for a while, but the review must have gotten misplaced somehow, because it just went up yesterday at Blurt.

So, no actual news here, but it does (I think) read pretty well.

Frightened Rabbit
Pedestrian Verse
Canvasback

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Frightened Rabbit, out of Scotland, has always balanced the triumphant with the desperate, building large-scale, cathartic climaxes out of ragged guitar riffs, throat-sore shouts and gut-punched, rabble-rousing drums. Their sound has always been simultaneously a fist in the air and an open wound, a celebration of overcoming that is not quite certain, not quite over. Pedestrian Verse is the band’s fourth full-length, the first for Atlantic subsidiary Canvasback, but in no way a betrayal of the band’s rough-edged aesthetic. Pounding, pulsing, head-rattling “Holy” is among the band’s best rockers ever, and “State Hospital” another in a continuing series of poetic but dead-on conjurations of mental illness.

In the interval since Winter of Mixed Drinks, Frightened Rabbit has toured relentlessly – and so has played many of these songs repeatedly, on stage, before laying them down to tape. As a result there is more of a live, kinetic energy to this album, and less of the studio experiments and sound collages that dotted previous albums. The sound, too, is noticeably cleaner, with keyboards, in particular, showing up more sharply than before. Yet though these songs may be fresh out of the shower, they haven’t been blow-dried or overstyled. The shout-along choruses of “Woodpile” rumble with raw masculine intensity, the drums punch through power chords vibrating with dissonance. Everything is urgent and loaded with consequence.

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Mice Parade interview

So, as it turned out, I was only moderately into Mice Parade's latest album, and the interview with Adam Pierce didn't go well at all...but you know, we can't be brilliant ALL the time, can we?

Anyway, my interview with Pierce ran yesterday at PopMatters...check it out. By the way, I don't know why he's so snotty about 1-4-5 chord progressions. I love that Frightened Rabbit album he's referring to.


No Flamenco: An Interview with Mice Parade’s Adam Pierce

Seven albums and 15 years into his career as Mice Parade, Adam Pierce refuses to be pigeonholed, hemmed in or even defined by critical expectations.


By Jennifer Kelly 9 April 2013

“There’s absolutely no flamenco on this record,” says Mice Parade’s Adam Pierce, who, it must be said, is a little touchy about the whole concept of world music influences. He has, indeed, studied flamenco guitar, played Chinese harps and based the percussion on one song on his new album Candela on a beat by Thomas Mapfumo.

Rather, he suggests, the new record is more of an indie rock album. He’s even appropriated the 1-4-5 chord structures favored by Frightened Rabbit (he mixed their new Pedestrian Verse) into his toolbox. “Mice Parade would intentionally use non-traditional chord progressions,” he says. “But I worked with a lot of bands—Frightened Rabbit for instance—that have 1-4-5 in every song. And I just figured it would be fun…”

“People always ask me about this world music, other music, but that was never a goal,” says Pierce. “I never had that conscious thought. It’s true that I love music from all around the world, I think it’s a shame that more of us don’t listen to more of that kind of stuff. I guess that whatever you listen to will naturally sort of happen in your songwriter.“


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Fruit Tree Foundation

A couple of summers ago, it seemed like I was listening to nothing but Scottish music, the two early albums by Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit, a bit of James YOrkston, some reissued Fire Engines, Sons & Daughters...and it wasn't a bad thing at all. The Fruit Tree Foundation brings together a few of these artists -- plus a few others (Rod Jones from Idlewild, Emma Pollack from the Delgados, Alasdair Roberts -- to raise money and awareness for the Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival.

Unlike a lot of benefit records (and even for-profit compilations), this one is not made up of cast-offs from earlier sessions. The artists actually went to a house in Perthshire to write the music, consciously focusing on themes around mental well-being...The songs fit together rather well as a result, and, moreover, there are lots of interesting pairings. I like this one, particularly, which puts Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit and Rod Jones from Idlewild together, in a fairly compelling blend of vulnerability and guitar shimmer...

"I Forgot the Fall"

Frightened Rabbit

I called The Winter of Mixed Drinks Frightened Rabbit’s “best so far” in my Dusted review…and I’m really, really liking the heft of it, the chemical reaction between lushness and sparsity, the late-album upward turn the converts this from a suicide note to a paeon to love.

Here’s that opening paragraph:

No one who’s listened closely to “Sing the Greys,” off Frightened Rabbit’s 2007 debut, would question whether Scott Hutchison has a close acquaintance with depression, nor that his brother Grant’s frantic, kit-battering drumming is fueled by anger. It’s always been easy to overlook Frightened Rabbit’s dark side, focusing instead on the ragged buoyancy of their melodies, the fractious energy of their scrubby guitars. Still, it’s there. It’s always been there. So, while in some ways The Winter of Mixed Drinks is the band’s darkest, most soul-searching album yet, it’s not unprecedented. What’s new is the sense of cathartic overcoming in this third full-length. The front half of Mixed Drinks is littered with images of drowning, grave-digging and really excessive consumption of alcohol, but by its penultimate song, the triumphant “Living in Color,” you get the sense that the Hutchison brothers have turned the corner.

There’s more if you like

“Nothing Like You” (they’re pushing the simplest, least interesting song on the album…as usual)