Backstory: Led by Scott Hutchison in collaboration with his brother Grant and friend Billy Kennedy, Glasgow, Scotland’s Frightened Rabbit scored a lot of Internet-based love for its 2006 debut, “Sing the Greys,” which Fat Cat Records re-released last fall. For their follow-up, the group worked with producer Peter Katis (Interpol, the National, the Twilight Sad) and knocked out 14 tracks in only two weeks.
Why you should care: Unlike many indie bands that feel designed to please and diagrammed by audience expectations, Frightened Rabbit emerges as if they already existed inside you and are finally making themselves known. Not only are they musically appealing—just try not to bob along with the back porch stomp of “Old Old Fashioned”—they're lyrically clever in a sometimes funny, always meaningful way. (An example, from “Good Arms vs. Bad Arms”: “I’m armed with the past and the will…and a brick.”) “Sing the Greys” was an extremely promising debut that lacked a bit of urgency and tightness, but “The Midnight Organ Fight” is better on nearly every level, while maintaining the commitment to songwriting and sheer likeability of its predecessor.
Verdict: Including three interludes, each about a minute long, was ill advised and diminishes the high from the full-length tunes. Still, these Scots just want to be a good, smart rock band, and it's the rare outfit that can do that without pretense or irony and still sincerely entertain. “The Midnight Organ Fight” is your drinking buddy, your wingman and the friend who tells it like it is, an unlikely triple threat and a triumph by a band that doesn’t know the meaning of “sophomore slump.” It jangles, it enlightens, it rocks.
X-Factor: The band is that rare act that delivers when its reputation precedes it: the group played a sold-out show at New York's Mercury Lounge before "Sing the Greys" was even available in the U.S. Good to know that sometimes hype and worth of mouth don't lead to backlash—just more people who've discovered something of quality.
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