“There is light but there's a tunnel to crawl through” Emotionally and musically Frightened Rabbit have more often than not been steeped in the working-through of the detritus of life and relationships: exhibited as both a contemplative journey through the motions of melancholy, and bursts of raw, reactionary rage. Yet, with their fourth LP Pedestrian Verse, the emphasis on this working-through has been lifted from that of the seemingly Sisyphean to more of a Kübler-Ross process - developing towards an infinitely more resoundingly cathartic working-out. Appropriately the album kicks off with an answer to the crucial central conundrum of The Winter of Mixed Drinks: “Are you a man or are you a bag of sand?”, and it’s immediately clear that singer and lyricist Scott Hutchison is far more assertive and analytical of his status as the former. The flaws and mistakes that dog those whom he writes of as well as he himself, though certainly not something to be proud of, are approached with forthrightness as the ‘Acts of Man’. Though in expressing this increasingly mature awareness perhaps some of his characteristically blistering sadness has dissipated, little that made Hutchinson so essential has been lost, and the tone is typically confessional. The specific approach appears to be that the scars of the chips on his shoulders are still there, even if the wounds themselves are healing. Nowhere however, is the band’s development more evident than at the level of sound. These songs’ production, both creatively and technically, is undeniably far tighter and more cohesive than previously, and every rhythm, chord shift and tempo switch-up has seemingly been thought through back and forth. There’s a meticulousness here which far from appearing in anyway cold or calculated, instead asserts itself as the fruition of craft. In doing so they’ve quite brilliantly taken the cliché of the consequence of exposure to a major label aesthetic: well-loved indie group horrendously victimised by torturer-cum-producer’s buckets of stifling gloss in some fantastical musical version of Hostel – and instead used it as a mechanism for both refinement and expansion. Opening tracks ‘Acts of Man’ and ‘Backyard Skull’ in particular embody this, immediately identifiable and engaging, but with touches of experimentation which represent a renewed confidence in their sonic capacities which their song-writing has always promised. Appropriately, a lot of the record’s reception has commented on this in through the lens of the record’s “focus”, received in both a positive and negative sense – and though I’d fall happily into the camp of the former, there are nonetheless moments where perhaps a looser treatment of the material, with even more space and time would only benefit it. ‘Housing ‘ in both its ‘(In)’ and ‘(Out)’ forms for instance, have all the promise of germinating into glorious anthems, each satisfyingly breaking up the flow of the record with its urgency, but unfortunately they last all to briefly, left as tantalising and consequently all-the-more disappointing saplings. But these few instances, on a record that fulfils the band’s knack for togetherness epitomised in their live performance better than any previous attempt, stand as the exception that proves the rule. The introspection, the working-through, “the tunnel” is still this particular rabbit’s habitat (an artist whose first album was entitled …Sings the Greys wouldn’t ever switch paths that drastically!), but accompanying the band’s development comes the increasing potential for an ever-realistic, yet all the more attainable for that, hope. The last sound we hear is bird song. Download: ‘Holy’, ‘The Oil Slick’ For Fans of: The Twilight Sad, The National, Death Cab For Cutie