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White Rabbits

It's Frightening

Label: Mute

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There’s suddenly a lot of animals around in music, have you noticed? Especially rabbits. Just when we’d all fallen in love with Scottish Indie rockers Frightened Rabbit (last seen supporting Modest Mouse!), along comes Brooklyn’s six-piece White Rabbits’ with their second studio album, the coincidentally titled It’s Frightening. Listening to it for the first time, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in fact hearing a new record by Cold War Kids. Not entirely frightening, but a little odd all the same. 

Heralded by a burst of seemingly forced and slightly mocking laughter, the epic opening track and lead single, ‘Percussion Gun’, complete with a passionately strained vocal, hammered piano chords and, of course, a lot of percussion, sounds remarkably like the aforementioned Long Beach quartet. The similarly impassioned second song, ‘Rudie Fails’ (perchance a play on The Clash’s ‘Rudie Can’t Fail'...) also continues in a similar vein, with Cold War Kids style socio-political lyrics about “keeping the money under the mattress”.

Then however, on the brilliantly funky third track ‘They Done Wrong / We Done Wrong’ the Rabbits manage to pull an amazing impression of an upbeat Radiohead out of their hat (see what we did there?). It’s one of those foot-thumping tracks that builds and builds until you just don’t want to end, but when it inevitably does, the band simply add a startling new angle to the mix. The atmospheric ‘Lionesse’ (another single) utilises the same many-layered, pounding percussion with a hint of the madness of the Jefferson Airplane track they may well have lifted their name from. 

It’s time for a quick breather next, with the more sedate, acoustic number ‘Company I Keep’, singer Alexander Even sounding more like Thom Yorke with every breath. ‘The Salesman (Tramp Life)’, the beautiful ‘Midnight And I’ and ‘Right Where They Left’ pick up the pace again, the band now sounding (obviously ) like Cold War Kids playing Radiohead songs. But hey, that’s great, right? We certainly think so. In terms of consistency of tone and emotion, it’s a near perfect record, forgetting perhaps, the rather forgettable and therefore appropriately titled closer ‘Leave It At The Door’. Can’t have everything now, can we... - Isaac Howlett