Frightened Rabbit’s 2008 album The Midnight Organ Fight seemed to catch most folks off-guard. There was just something raw and emotionally honest about this little Scottish band that listeners could really connect with. For me personally, it happened when I first heard the stellar song, “The Modern Leper,” which was enough to cause me to do a double-take. I had to hear more music from this band. Well, the thing about first impressions is that you can only make them once, and while there were probably a bunch of listeners who had caught Frightened Rabbit’s first album, Sing the Grey, I would be willing to wager that there were an equal number who had their introductions made by that great sophomore album. This being the case, The Winter of Mixed Drinks is an important album for the band, where they have the burden of proving that the excitement generated from that first impression wasn’t just a flash in the pan.
While the title of the album never ceases to make me cringe, it is undeniable that on The Winter of Mixed Drinks, Frightened Rabbit is able to largely cultivate a more robust sound. While the band made the wise decision of bringing back Peter Katis as their producer (he also produced Midnight Organ), they clearly were determined to create a more rich sound here on their third album. This is something that they accomplished. This was evident even early-on from the two singles, “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and “Nothing Like You,” which preceded the album’s release. Both songs are more lively and crowded affairs than virtually any track off of their previous two albums, and while the bare-bones aesthetic of much of the music off Midnight Organs could be attributed as giving that album much of its charm, both tracks seem much more readily able to fill the shoes of a traditional single than anything you had previously heard from the band.
This does, however, lead to one of my complaints about The Winter of Mixed Drinks, though, in that sometimes I feel some of the wittiness and endearing tenderness of their previous couple albums was sacrificed in attempt to be a little more cute and catchy. ”FootShooter,” for example is a song that strikes me as being a bit too on-the-nose and cute for its own good. It’s not that the song is outright “bad,” per-say, more just that it seems like the average work of a lessor band. I found “Not Miserable,” to be similarly tedious, as it brought all the melancholy of the band’s better work, but none of the articulation that made that bleak subject matter endearing. Both songs were the kind that were enjoyable enough on the first listen, but didn’t really hold up at all through any kind of repeat visits.
Fortunately, on the album’s high points, Frightened Rabbit seem able to combine their more intricate musical composition with the same biting lyrical content of their previous standout tracks. Perhaps the best example of this is the track “The Wrestle,” which not only manages to be pretty damn catchy, but with lyrics like “the vice clinch of the struggle, I can’t give into the weight of, the clothe-less wrestle” it also manages to be one of the more inventive and interesting songs that I’ve heard about sex in a long, long, time — and make no mistake about it, with a subject as well worn as that, this is no small amount of praise. Just as impressive is that when the song swells (a strange choice of words given the subject matter?) to its chorus, it is every bit as triumphantly hooky as the chorus on “Swim Until You Can’t See Land.” I also found it worth noting that the band could be every bit as effective when the subject matter is a bit more playful, as was the case on “The Wrestle,” as when they are sounding bleak and heartbroken.
There were also some moments on this album where the band made some choices that I couldn’t help but find to be absolutely bizarre. The forgettable “Man / Bag of Sand” is a primary example of this. The song is essentially a loose rehash of “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” with some loose acoustic guitar and the vocals dialed way back. This would struck me a strange choice to include as a b-side on a single, let alone being stuck in the middle of their album. They virtually replicated this decision with the last song of the album, an alternate version of “Things,” that is basically just an acoustic version of the opener. The fact that I wasn’t really over the moon for the first version of the track probably didn’t help to endear me too much to the this second incarnation. Additionally, I was similarly lukewarm about the inclusion of “Skip the Youth,” which at six minutes-plus, seems to kind of meander on far longer than necessary without ever really going anywhere in particular. All in all, these three songs just seemed weird in contrast with the more fully-realized sound of the other nine on the album.
There is enough about The Winter of Mixed Drinks that I both really enjoyed and really did not, that I am not quite comfortable calling the LP really either a step forward or a step backward for the band. In all actuality, it’s probably an example of the group moving sideways. They may not have captured the same magic of Midnight Organ, but it is not as though there’s anything here that really turned me off to the band’s music. Frightened Rabbit shows signs of growth, but as often is the case, there are also some growing pains. At least, though, the band seems as though they won’t be content with just standing still.
SCORE: 3.0 out of 5.0
