It’s an odd thing that two of this writer’s favorite bands
feature singers whose voices, at first listen, were so jarring as to require
ducking away from the music for a short period of adjustment. Brent Best of Slobberbone was the first of
these—his barrel-chested moan wheezing forth to capture all of the love and
dread that lies between Texas and the Great Lakes.
Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit was the second. He died this week.
Amber Soles still hasn’t heard a note of the band’s debut
album Sing the Greys. But when The
Midnight Organ Fight sprouted up out of the ground in 2007, in many ways it
seemed instantly massive, a pinnacle piece for all that indie music had been
climbing or building toward since the 1980s.
The guitar and studio work was brilliant for an early-career album. The melodies were everywhere. And my God, there were the words.
A lot like Mr. Best a few years before, Mr. Hutchison’s
lyrics erupt like a geyser or a shockingly successful oil drilling. The words are everywhere, arriving in great
clusters crowding into lines, every clause a vivid image and many of them via
metaphor, many of them harrowingly clever…all of them linking together into a
sepia wallpaper pattern of care and anguish and loss.
And his voice was a brass mallet. For ears perpetually eased in tones of
Francis Reader, Tracyanne Campbell, and Neil Halstead, the voice of The Midnight Organ Fight was a shock—what
Ted Hughes had described in the previous century as a “sudden sharp hot stink
of fox”, alive and moving through a midnight’s moment forest. It sounded like no other voice in music, raw
and unkempt and unloading serial volleys of sardonic lament.
Frightened Rabbit eventually managed the supreme feat of the
artist—taking a perfect achievement of talent and somehow improving upon
it. The
Midnight Organ Fight was perfect, and a few years later they gave us Pedestrian Verse, which was better.
The indie “aesthetic”, to the extent that foolish writers
are allowed to generalize, has always been at least partially about poised
separation and detachment; the genre has included a smirk, and an understanding
that the artist and the audience are a least a little bit knowing. Melodies and guitar lines are always at least
slightly off-kilter, indirect. Full-bore
emotional immersion has rather been an approach for straight-ahead rock or
other less indirect forms of musical expression.
Low among the horrible things about Mr. Hutchison’s fate is
that it seems that there was no separation here. The writing was clearly not from a safe perch
at a distance, with fields and hedges of recovery and healing in-between. May he have found peace in separation now,
and rest within it.
Dear God. Please get
him a guitar. Give Yourself a short
while to get used to that voice. It will
be worth it.
May 2018
