My Night Down the Rabbit Hole

Sunday night was a treat. Sure, it would have been awesome to experience this with some friends, but everyone was busy so I had to ride solo in seeing one of my favorite bands, Frightened Rabbit, play at the Black Cat.

They've released a few new songs over the last year, a few of them quite good and several just kinda meh. But the Scottish band only makes it over to the US once a year, and they included DC in the nine-city tour so I had to make sure I didn't miss them.

The played just about everything I wanted to hear, but what made the concert so awesome was how they slightly altered the arrangement of songs we all knew well. Many upbeat songs were played more dulcet or muffled, and the inclusion of a new guitarist meant more jamming and feedback when certain songs did reach their crescendo.

If there was a downside to the night, it was the dickhead behind me who proudly (and drunkenly) proclaimed, "Fuck all y'all, I'm the obnoxious 'whoop' guy tonight" and proceeded to whoop after every damn song and sounded like jackass the entire night. Luckily I was able to maneuver a few people forward that way their ears were blasted by his annoying bullshit all night. This was capped by him singing every damn song off key and out of rhythm because of the before-mentioned changes in how the songs were played.

Nevertheless, he didn't spoil a thing for me. Of the three big highlights from the show, the first was a pared-down version of Backwards Walk, which Scott almost apologized for as if he was reliving a bad breakup with a girl in front of us and just needed to grind through that song. It was stellar, and the best rendition I've heard them do of it in the three concerts I've attended.



The second was the band playing a 6-song encore, which just normally isn't done anymore because bands and venues try to keep the time limit on shows to a hard line. And it's not like they were making up for a weak main set. By the tail end of the encore, Scott kept saying, "OK, really, just one more. You are all too fucking good tonight" as they dipped into earlier albums or plucked a favorite B side track that everyone still knew the words to.

The last highlight was the top-tier of concert highlights … the white whale of live shows … the double encore. They closed the encore with The Loneliness, which if you listen to the song below, ends with a great opportunity for crowd interaction.



They finished the song with all of us reciting that cheer, and they took their bows, left the stage and the house brought up the lights and started the house music to tell us all to go home. Well, instead of shuffling off most everyone stayed and kept on singing that chant. Over and over again.

About 5 minutes of this (and believe me, that chant isn't very long, so five sustained minutes of this was worthy of giving you goosebumps) and the band strolled back up for a tired, but always-excellent, final closer of Keep Yourself Warm. I've been to many concerts where fans try to entice the band into playing longer and 99% of them never do. When Scott and the guys came back onto the stage with fresh shots of whiskey poured, you just knew they were feeling it. We all were.