Forming in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers that presented frontman Scott Hutchison as self-loathing, self-destructive, but ultimately sympathetic. By 2010, success and expanding ambition started to strain against their underdog appeal. That tension was projected onto the anxious, thickly overdubbed The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Pedestrian Verse arrived three years later, an album that isn’t widely considered their best, but it's definitive in its own way. It's the one that said “this is who we are going forward”: a major-label band that plays 2000-3000 cap rooms. Shortly thereafter, Hutchison moved to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. Sub in High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me for their respective years, and this is basically the same exact career trajectory as the National, so it’s only natural that the two bands go from sharing tour bills and a producer (Peter Katis) to sharing a studio—and so with Aaron Dessner behind the boards, Painting of a Panic Attack is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention.
“Death Dream” immediately extinguishes any hope that Frightened Rabbit might return to the scrappy charms of Sing the Greys or The Midnight Organ Fight. He often plays the religious skeptic in his lyrics, but Hutchison sure thinks piano sounds heavenly in a church; it’s hard not to think of “Fake Empire” just from the mere tone of the reverberant chord that opens “Death Dream.” By the time the progression begins to settle, it’s pretty much impossible to not hum “stay out...super late…tonight,” as the “Fake Empire” melody fits almost exactly. While it boasts Hutchison’s most vivid and morbid poetry yet, “Death Dreams” doesn’t lift off, floating more towards the rafters like a errant balloon. So it makes for a curious opener, though it’s an accurate preview of yet another instance where Dessner’s charges end up sounding like his main band.
This can work for a newer act that’s trying to hit a similar emotional tenor to the National. On their respective sophomore LPs, Local Natives and Sharon Van Etten followed raw debuts by contrasting Dessner’s sumptuous, solemn orchestration with simmering angst, the sound of people trying their best not to crack up in public. A band less willing to exert their own personality ends up with something like Wilder Mind. Painting is somewhere in between; Dessner helps add a silvery stylization to Frightened Rabbit’s jittery indie-folk on “Break,” while late-album ballads “400 Bones” and “Die Like a Rich Boy” cover Hutchison’s barstool laments with Rag & Bone sympathy. The choral burst of “Get Out” is jarring in a strictly musical sense, more so if you once viewed Frightened Rabbit as an alternative to post-Britpop Patsavas-core like Snow Patrol and Travis. But "Grey’s Anatomy" is still chugging along and thus will need stadium-ready surges from a bearded man with a burly voice expressing an all-purpose longing about a flawed girl that won’t get out of his heart.
They’re both effective, as formula should be, reliant on devices that become cliches only within their established parameters. After The Midnight Organ Fight, Hutchison joked that he couldn’t make another break-up record because he hadn’t had one that year. But it seems like he’s recognized that fans rely on Frightened Rabbit for a specific kind of Scottish miserablism, which Painting of a Panic Attack delivers with consistency if not conviction. They don’t strike me as cynical, so I’d hate to use the word “pandering” for the way uber-Frightened Rabbit laments “Blood Under the Bridge,” “An Otherwise Disappointing Life,” and “Woke Up Hurting” play towards expectations. But it’s really difficult to do otherwise after Hutchison’s expected recriminations of god, booze, and breakups tell you nothing the titles didn’t already, and the heavy-handed rhyming of “I Wish I Was Sober” only enhances the suspicion that it’s concept-driven exercise rather than an expression of actual emotion.
Yet, the best Frightened Rabbit songs aren’t entirely defined by their despondance or desperation. What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing. It’s admittedly impossible to gauge the legitimacy of Hutchison’s emotions; like the National, maybe Frightened Rabbit have just gotten too good at their formula for it to not seem self-aware. And too often, the title of Painting of a Panic Attack serves as an unintentional reminder of the way Hutchison comes across: like a television version of a person with a broken heart.
