Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
This is a call for auditions.
I'm about to enter a world of pain. My heart is about to never be the same again. I’m about to find my lower jaw locked and tightening as the sun begins to set. In the bluest of skies, I'm about to find hints of rain. This is a call for auditions: when the dust settles, the songs that carry me through the next few months, weeks and days are the songs I'll believe saved me.
I’m thinking of starting things.
Even when you know you’re about to be broken up, you’re pretty broken up. After the initial wash of relief and regret, there’s pain: a dull pang in the chest, a head that constantly threatens to ache, and the lower jaw – god, the lower jaw. It’s true what they say about food losing its taste and the flowers losing their scent – it’s true even when you know it’s coming. Just like new love comes with a rush of blood even when it shows itself from a mile away, this is the same, but exactly the opposite. Falling in love is like an octave completed: home base, perfect melody. But as you improvise the melody as you go, not every note that follows fits. You miss beats, notes; cacophony ensues, until finally, after an atonal crescendo, the music stops abruptly. In silence, you’re grateful for the lack of noise, but there’s no home base in silence. Is silence the opposite of cacophony? Or is it the opposite of the perfect melody? I don’t know.
I’m thinking of starting things. Hitting the gym, learning the fundamentals of macroeconomics, reaching these stories I write to anybody who cares to listen, wherever they might be. It’s how I’ve always dealt with the crumbling of things: by concocting success stories with me as their protagonist. We’ll show her, I’m sure my subconscious is muttering angrily. My conscious mind is trying to ignore him, take a deep breath, be present in the present, get over it, watch something, play something – When Harry Met Sally, Joan Baez, anything. But he can hear my subconscious pacing through the thin plywood wall that separates their rooms, plotting, raving. I don’t want to drift away to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, hating myself and the world that houses me. I don’t want to stare out of my window as an inert afternoon precipitates, listening to Sea Change. I don’t want to stare at my walls, angrily listening to Exile In Guyville. If these soundtrack my latest bounceback, how can I expect the rest of my life to look any different from my life so far? I want something else. I want something more.
I’m thinking of starting things. Sometimes it’s easier to find your way in the dark, I can imagine an older version of myself saying without a hint of irony. Sometimes it’s easier to find your way in the dark. While sometimes it’s hard to be productive when your heart’s sunk to the pits of your bowels, sometimes it’s the easiest thing you can do. Writing as catharsis. Writing as a way to just reach out to somebody, anybody who’ll listen. Writing to announce: hey, I’m in pain but I’m making it. Truth be told, at a time when millions are losing their lung function, their loved ones or, worst of all, their lives, losing a relationship doesn’t seem as terrible a loss. Yet I will mope.
The Midnight Organ Fight
Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight is a perfect breakup album, I hear. A classic of modern Scottish music, I hear. While I’ve heard several musicians rave about it in the past, I’ve never heard it until this weekend. As I immerse myself into it for the second time since the event we will from now on refer to simply as the Event, I can vouch for its effectiveness as a soundtrack to the aftermath of the Event; whether or not it’s perfect, only time will tell. Its alt-folk-but-basically-pop songs seem to owe a lot to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, just like so much alt-folk-but-basically-pop does. Every one of the album’s fourteen songs, every minute of its forty-eight, is an unvarnished look into what follows the Event. It’s quite simply and perfectly captured on I Feel Better, the album’s second track.
I feel much better, and better, and worse and then better / Than ever
Musically, this album is purely about simple, unobtrusive, but catchy vocal and melodic hooks. What makes it stand out in the fairly competitive playing field that is heartbreak indie is its sincere lyricism, delivered with unvarnished authenticity by (the late) Scott Hutchison (RIP). When you’re talking about something like the end of a romantic relationship, sometimes you’ll find the same words everyone before you has used to describe how you feel. Maybe sometimes you’ll say something truly unique. But mostly, you will find yourself somewhere in the middle. Particularly through Good Arms vs. Bad Arms, The Twist, Head Rolls Off, Keep Yourself Warm, Poke, the album’s standout tracks, Hutchison vacillates between self-loathing and anger, depression and delusional hypomania. It’s like he says on I Feel Better: I feel much better, and better, and worse and then better.
Every word he sings treads the line between poetic and prosaic, and that’s precisely why you’re hooked. This isn’t dry descriptions of uneaten dessert dinners, or mawkish portrayals of dream sequences in which girl and boy reunite on a daisy field. What it is is a real world that’s neither a sequence of incomplete meals nor a string of half-remembered dreams, but something else: living on imperfectly, but to the best of one’s ability. See, just like Frightened Rabbit, all I can do is strive to write authentically. Sometimes I’ll find the same words everyone before me has used. Sometimes I’ll say something truly unique. But mostly, I will find myself somewhere in the middle. And that’s ok, as long as I’m being truthful. Over the next few days, weeks, months, sometimes it’s going to be ok. Sometimes it’s going to be great. But sometimes, it’s going to hurt like a motherf*****. And that’s ok.
