Review: Frightened Rabbit, The Duchess, York, Thursday (From York Press)

Review: Frightened Rabbit, The Duchess, York, Thursday

6:40am Saturday 6th March 2010 in

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THE last time Selkirk brothers Scott and Grant Hutchison played York, it was down the stairs at City Screen.

Frightened Rabbit’s popularity has ballooned and is still rising with this week’s release of their third album, The Winter Of Mixed Drinks, and maybe it has caught this still developing band by surprise.

Had Thursday night’s gig gone ahead in November as first planned, advance ticket sales had stood at around 80, but Scott and co were greeted by the proverbial packed house on Thursday.

While it would be trite to say Frightened Rabbit were caught in the headlines of heightened expectations, nevertheless they were unsettled by this raising of the bar. Even Scott admitted to first-night nerves at this opening show of their March tour, despite his band having played to 80,000 revellers on Scottish home soil at Edinburgh’s Hogmany only a few months ago.

They didn’t so much bottle it as stretch too hard, over eager at the giddying thrill of playing their best raft of songs so far. In Rabbit tradition too, more of them keep popping up, five of them now, the ranks newly bolstered by Gordon Skene, and in truth the new line-up is still finding its feet.

They chose to play loud under The Duchess’s low ceiling, understandable given their swelling structures, but it flattened too many songs, and when Scott made light of botching one number midway through, they promptly played it again, with even worse results.

Frightened Rabbit will have far better nights; the new album demands that they do.