In 2007, six guys who wore stylish suits, stood in the backs of stylish bars, and still said "dance card" came out of Columbia to a fair bit of critical notice. Don't worry, you didn't sleep through anything: White Rabbits were Brooklyn-via Columbia, Missouri, not University, and their pop was big and brassy instead of mellow and breezy. They might have been more Walkmen than Whit Stillman, but White Rabbits knew how to be formal, nonetheless. Fort Nightly was an assured, occasionally very good debut, but it was also just stylistically traditionalist enough to render it somewhat anonymous in relation to the trendier members of the attention economy.
Enter Britt Daniel, and meet It's Frightening. When White Rabbits started thinking about recording their second album, they'd been friendly with the guys in Spoon for a while, and even a slight listen to Nightly suggests Daniel saw tons of raw material to work with. And work he did: Daniel didn't just produce Frightening, he served as its songwriting Svengali from the earliest stages, cutting Nightly's urbane pop with the cryptic artiness of Gimme Fiction. Daniel's ghost lingers particularly strongly on "Lionesse", "They Done Wrong/We Done Wrong", and "The Salesman (Tramp Life)", which casual fans could be excused for confusing with actual Spoon songs. All the elements are here: the in medias res studio chatter and expressionistic, dubby sound effects; the gloomy, resonant left-hand piano chords; the clippy acoustic guitars. Singer Stephen Patterson-- whose vocals are less impressive than on the debut-- even rolls the occasional consonant and slips seamlessly into a near-falsetto at appropriate moments. They're painting with the grain a bit, but that's okay: It's a good trail to walk down, and White Rabbits show themselves as eager, attentive prodigies.
Like Fiction, and apropos of its title, Frightening can be dark and cavernous when it wants to. Indeed, it's that Poe-ish sense of lonesome, luxurious dread threading through the record that separates it most starkly from Nightly. Patterson cries out for someone to just listen to him, he dreams of the curtains catching fire and lighting up the room, he focuses on the vent of light spreading across the floor from under the doorway. The eerie, solemn vibe swallows Frightening as it closes, when "The Lady Vanishes" and "Leave It at the Door" dive deeply into the shadows, letting the album slowly dissolve out like a lengthy crane shot slowly tracking backwards. At the end of a record that clocks in at just over a half-hour, though, I will admit to checking my watch once or twice in the last few minutes.
I was antsy only because the rest of the album had packed such a punch to that point, though. Frightening often sounds spooked, but the guys are still as cocksure as prizefighters, most of their arrangements packing enough polyrhythms for three regular songs. They come out swinging from the opening bell on "Percussion Gun", one of this year's best-yet opening tracks. Under the surface, it's a simple song about crumbling relationships, with clever lyrics ("Where do you get off/ And how can I get there, too?"). The band hits first with the arrangement, though, weaving a seething guitar/piano combo in and out of an incessant floor-tom rhythm redolent of Adam & the Ants' "Kings of the Wild Frontier". "Gun" segues perfectly into "Rudie Fails", which keeps pushing forward, but with a broader purpose. Playing his Clash card before cashing out, Patterson sighs, "While everyone's duking it out and taking names/ Well, I'll just take a number," before proclaiming over and over, "I don't care at all!" It's a way of making punk nihilism sound... strangely manageable, but this sort of refraction is the register in which White Rabbits work best. The script might contain plenty of familiar elements, but they're ably, and occasionally superbly, shuffled and recast.
