Only a few weeks after a triumphant gig at Queen’s Hall with a full complement of his Frightened Rabbit brethren, Scott Hutchison’s acoustic set is not tonight’s only reason to be cheerful. As the last vestiges of the Tartan Army pour out of Waverley Station, their drunken smiles and genial posturing serve to confirm a victory for Scotland in today’s game against minnows Macedonia, keeping alive a slim hope (How slim? Imagine an emaciated James McFadden, our latter day Renton, trudging around Hampden on an IV drip) of qualification to next year’s World Cup in South Africa. Patriotism, however trite the concept can appear in its clumsy post-Braveheart guise (especially within the confines of an interior as fussy and aspirational as Electric Circus), is infectious, and so a similar elation is evident inside this evening’s near-capacity crowd. Hutchison, ever the realist, is quick to put our misplaced optimism firmly into perspective, not least by offering to christen a prospective song “Macedonia Is Full of Hairy Dogs” - a suggestion met with rueful fits of laughter.
Such pragmatism reflects the extent to which FR have grown accustomed to straight-batting the hyperbole that seems to greet them with ever increasing frequency and velocity. As if to hammer home the point, the ‘Frabbit frontman pronounces that he’ll play material from the Selkirk quartet’s forthcoming album, alongside “the usual shit”.
Of the usual shit, Modern Leper’s relative familiarity hasn’t eroded the potency of Hutchison’s emotionally sinuous songwriting, a quality that has always been the Glasgow-based foursome’s raison d’être. FR’s renowned exuberance is also in full effect; there’s an infinitely endearing charm to the way that Hutchison makes the entirely subconscious gesture of addressing the absence of his bandmates by stomping his foot along to Old Old Fashioned, acting as an impromptu drumkick with a force that pours scorn over this writer’s preconceptions of acoustic gigs; to wit, that in lesser hands, they can be rather insipid affairs.
“Have you not fucking heard them before anyway?” Hutchison’s playful reaction to an obstreperous crowd baying for FR’s signature ditties (notably My Backwards Walk and Keep Yourself Warm, both of which the band have long since resigned themselves to performing at every gig henceforth) fails to disguise his eagerness to leave the comfort of his laurels well alone. The be-a-man refrain of Swim Until You Can’t See Land, for example, gives away a tantalising hint at the direction FR may yet take following Midnight Organ Fight’s erudite laments of hand-on-heart melancholy. Ambitions enforced with such conviction not only affirms the extent to which Frightened Rabbit have become important, but equally, such lofty notions seem utterly lost on Hutchison, who remains thoroughly unimpressed with his own achievements, lest we get excited about one-upping a diddy football team.
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