Frightened Rabbit: "Swim Until You Can’t See Land"

It has been many moon now that gentlemen like Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby have been using brusque and racy dude-jargon to out-weigh or wash down heaping helpings of dude-feelings. They hold dudes’ hands, Sacajawea-ing them through tricky emotional terrain: from run-of-the-mill identity dilemmas, to mixtapes, to breakups, to breakup mixtapes, to “eek—commitment!” moments and, goodness knows, to those unbearable nights of whopping, Hank-Williams-heavy dude loneliness. In the process assisting both these dudes-with-baffling-dude-emotions and dudes-besotted-with-dudes-riddled-with-dude-emotions, offering them ways to cope, hug it out and sing it out in the shower at the top of their dude lungs; to melt and salve their wounded dude hearts, otherwise left to beat like sad, warm little puppies just beneath that seemingly cold and impenetrable dudely permafrost of chest hair.

Frightened Rabbit have become one of these dudes-with-feelings gurus. Songs that whisper, gulp for retribution and attention and holler of solitude while burying their (am I imagining it?) resemblance to Dashboard Confessional under thick, Scottish accents. And it’s alright, no really, it’s okay—to have and express your dudely emotions, you know, as long as you’re an appropriately-stubbled, over-the-pond dude who can insert some expletives into songs and balance dude-feelings and metaphors-for-dude-feelings with legit plaid, grubby t-shirts and pulverized jeans. And throw in a song or so about humping…? Alone on Sing the Greys (2006/2007) and even when accompanied by three new wingmen in The Midnight Organ Fight (2008) lead singer and lyricist Scott Hutchison is nothing if not this ideal, weather-beaten “dude’s dude,” looking and sounding like he’s always rolled out of a pub at 2am.

Frightened Rabbit’s (kind of?) at it again in The Winter of Mixed Dreams: the same themes, certainly, though with a fifth band member and far, far more accompaniment this go-round. A more considered and experimental backup, with soaring strings and attentive percussive here-an-there’s. Scott does continue to belt it out—voice glugging and lurching though metaphors about being alone, and then something because I lost interest, and then more loneliness, going numb, loneliness again, struggling…a twiddle of keyboard, as he flails to keep his head from going under the rising tide of dude feelings and simultaneously rising choir and tide of instruments we haven’t heard these guys use before, more strings and—phew, they decked this thing out. Really getting as much mileage as possible out of their new, fifth band member.

While this may please more middle-of-the-road fans who aren’t wrong in that it’s all pretty easy listening, this is potentially not what their surly-yet-affected dudes are in it for. The dudes who were reeled in by the Frightened Rabbit as a solo dude, singing his fucking face off all by his dudely lonesome. Or people like me who were just looking for something of the stripped-down and Scottish sort to fill that gaping Arab Strap void. While still being a veritable cornucopia of dude ordeals to latch upon and find comfort or company in…it’s seriously difficult to find intimacy or feel as close to a dude who’s suddenly almost lost in a five-piece band, and decked-to-shit-out in unfamiliar ornamentation. And of course harder to believe in all this “loneliness” coming from a dude surrounded by so many other dudes. Good on them, for exploring their options, but it feels over-full, severely over-planned, and I have a feeling most of their gentlemen followers will be disappointed for the harder-to-find, raw qualities they loved in previous albums.

I don’t mean to bust their chops about this. And I certainly won’t be the lady to begrudge guys some dude solace, nor tear asunder a troubled fella’s right to his own personal dude catharsis. However, a decent friend will tell you as much when you’re running around with your emotional fly down. So it is as a friendly lady that I say: as usual, I can’t help but feel embarrassed he’s running around with so much of his junk hanging out. And I can’t help worry Scott’s honesty-drenched hollering’s all for naught, if their core fanbase of dudes aren’t finding their connection in the new, shmancied-up, club. This is a Frightened Rabbit with a nice new suit, an entourage and an unwanted lot of spit polishing.