There are a few ingredients you need to make good pub rock; sticky carpets and small stages, a very pissed legend of a frontman, and loud, high emotion music. For all of the above see Frightened Rabbit’s set on Friday night. The Northcote Social Club was appropriately grimy, the brothers Hutchison were totally off their faces and the music was about as emotional as it could get. Though it is their style of understated indie rock, heard on 2008’s excellent LP Midnight Organ Fight that’s garnered them so much praise, after seeing them live, I can see why they are currently one of the hottest bands in the world.
The fact that their music was enjoyable was even more impressive, given the fact that the audience had to endure two mind numbingly bad support acts. Echo Echo were the definition of musical hacks, with lots of protracted guitar solos, and earnest half closed eyelids, just nothing music really. The Zillions were even worse. Their inoffensive brand of guitar rock, with chiming guitar work and hazy quasi-meaningful singing, is not even that bad, it was purely and simply that singer Nick Craft was about the biggest douche bag you’re ever likely to meet. Between chews of his gum he swaggered around the stage, insulting the other band members and performing the whole time with this cringe-inducing smirk. I can handle that kind of shit with someone like Lou Reed, you know, someone cool, with, um, talent. Anyways about the only good thing about the support acts was that they really made you appreciate Frightened Rabbit when they finally did get on stage.
The first thing to know about this band is that they’re Scottish. Really really Scottish. Dressed in tartan shirts and baggy jeans they’re generous guts and wild facial hair would be more appropriate on the set of Braveheart, rather than the pubs of the alternative music scene. However, like fellow Scottish luminaries Belle and Sebastian and Arab Strap, their Scottishness makes their music all the better.
It’s music from the stale smelling pubs and the windswept streets of Selkirk. It’s simple, raw and effective. The gory, very real images thrown out by front man Scott Hutchison in an often indistinguishable brogue epitomise the band’s ability to create beauty from the ugly. In encore tearjerker Poke “Our love will keel over, as it chokes upon a bone/and we will mourn its passing, and we’ll bury in the snow” is contrasted with “And then we’ll kick it’s cunt in/and watch as it dies from bleeding.” This is music born from experience, and it can be very moving.
But Frightened Rabbit can rock like the best of them. Held together by the insanely physical drumming of Grant Hutchison, their songs are three minutes of distilled energy. Like the thumping Old Old Fashioned with its jangling guitar line and changeable rhythmic structure or pounding single chord chug The Twist. Hutchison made the experience all the more special as well. He was just so happy and easy going, regaling the crowd with stories of broken guitars and strange Australian idioms.
The crowd was lapping it up too. I’d heard the album beforehand and was mighty impressed but I had no idea that Frightened Rabbit had built such a dedicated following over here. I felt a little out of place in the sea of swaying indie kids, enraptured smiles on their faces as they sung along to every word. Phrases like “best gig ever” and “I actually touched his hand” were heard all along High St, hours after the gig had finished, and I must say with good cause, because there aren’t many bands like Frightened Rabbit.
annak_76
said ages ago