Though it has only been two years since Frightened Rabbit released their breakout sophomore album, Midnight Organ Fight, a lot has changed. The Scottish group began as a trio featuring brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison and their friend Billy Kennedy, but they blossomed into a quartet during their last tour and are now a five-piece with the addition of Make Model's Gordon Skene. The band's sound has also expanded. Having made a name for themselves with raw, confessional folk-rock driven by urgent guitar interplay and brutal percussion, Frightened Rabbit have left behind their folky beginnings and given in to their loudest, most blustery impulses for their third full-length.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks is definitely more sophisticated than its predecessors. From the reverberating electronic buzz that swathes album opener "Things" to the spoken-word samples that lie underneath the droning "Man/Bag of Sand", Frightened Rabbit have muddled their simple melodies with arty effects, washes of shoegaze guitars, and baroque orchestrations. Tunes meander instead of galloping ahead toward a climactic chorus. Many songs are obsessed with oceanic motifs-- starting with the escapist maritime metaphors of the shuffling single "Swim Until You Can't See Land" and continuing through the sailing and floating imagery of the stomping "Living in Colour"-- and the album is likewise murky and vast. The Hutchison brothers still write rousing anthems, but the slickness of their production or the tarting-up of their simple setup makes them sound a little more like other bombastic bands from the British Isles (like Muse) and a little less like the band that made those first two albums.
One of the collection's best tracks, "Not Miserable", does manage to capture the dramatic crescendos of Midnight Organ Fight, but perhaps its title is a clue to Mixed Drinks' new sound. Frontman Scott Hutchison is, as he sings, not miserable anymore. Midnight Organ Fight was an account of his own terrible breakup, and though he doesn't necessarily sound happy throughout Mixed Drinks, he is definitely more optimistic and less heartbroken. "I am not put-upon, I am free from disease, no grays, no liver spots, most of the misery's gone," he sings of his newly earned glass-is-half-full outlook. But it was more viscerally affecting to hear Scott's hangdog tales of how it's OK with him if you call out the wrong name during sex or how it takes more than fucking someone to keep warm than it is to hear him detail the frustration, purpose, or assurance of moving on and growing up. Midnight Organ Fight announced with its title that its underlying concern was sex (not getting it, not getting it from who you want, being unfulfilled by it), and the songs on this new album, though more lyrically complex, seem neutered by comparison.
"Majestic," "grand," and "arena-worthy" are all words that could be used to describe this record. And when Frightened Rabbit play to their strengths and a song's chorus is sailing or Grant is pounding out stomping rhythms, it's hard to resist getting swept up in their pop fantasia. But the band's sound was always big, and their songs were always bursting with oversized emotion. The difference is that Midnight Organ Fight, recorded in two weeks, seemed spontaneous, and with its devastated post-breakup themes, it earned its aural space with its outsized emotional content. The glossy production of The Winter of Mixed Drinks coupled with its less personal/more universal storytelling, makes its songs seem bigger musically than their content deserves.
