#3 - Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks

Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks (2010)

Fat Cat, 2010

I think the reason I love Frightened Rabbit so much is that I can’t think of a band that I discovered at a more perfect time in my life. The Midnight Organ Fight was the soundtrack to a prolonged breakup, and what was effectively the worst I had ever felt up to that point in my life. When you’re depressed like that, sometimes hearing someone who know what that feels like sing it back to you is all that works. Working through 2008, that album became encoded in my DNA. At the very beginning of 2009 Jenny and I started dating and it’s like a switch flipped overnight. In 2010, The Winter of Mixed Drinks was released and I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to bond with it the way you are afraid you won’t be able to bond with your kids before they are born. What surprised me was that, though The Winter of Mixed Drinks has plenty of the self-deprecating, depressive, death-obsessed stuff, there’s...cautious optimism on this one. “Though the corners are lit,” Scott Hutchison sings, “The dark can return with the flick of a switch/ It hasn’t turned on me yet.” That line hurts now in the wake of Scott’s death, but he so perfectly captures that tenuous line between misery and contentment. No one mined the fragility of the human psyche like Scott Hutchison, and if anything I loved The Winter of Mixed Drinks because after The Midnight Organ Fight, it sounded like he was coming from a place of contentment.

The imagery on the album’s penultimate track– “Living in Colour”-- that always makes my heart swell. The song is such a beautiful account of crawling out of the darkness. “And as the night started swallowing/ You pulled the blood to my blue lips/ Forced the life through still veins/ Filled my heart with red again.” “Living in colour, living in colour/ I can see the paint on your toes.” It’s a goddamn shame things ended up the way they did for Scott. I always appreciated this album as a moment of clarity before returning to the darkness. I never expected it to end up as bad for Scott as it did, even though it seems obvious in hindsight. I still love this album more than anything.