Why I'm not ashamed to say that The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit is the album of the year

Here’s what’s wrong with The Midnight Organ Fight. The vocals are generally overwrought, barely in tune, and blessed with a Celtic yelp that we all thought we’d never have to hear again when the Cranberries fucked off. There are some appalling lyrics that occasionally rise to the surface with a dreadful jar – ‘It’s a choo-choo train, a rocket launch’ anyone? – and let’s just say that the drumming leaves something to be desired in terms of subtlety; it sounds like they’re being played with the hind legs of a cow. Most damning of all, if this album drifted out of the window of a passing car, the immediate assumption would be that Snow Patrol had decided to release an album of Counting Crows covers.

But here’s the thing. Despite all of these patent flaws, and the perpetual nagging feeling that you should somehow be embarrassed to be listening to it, The Midnight Organ Fight is indisputably the best album of 2008. It is a record of searing honesty, an unashamedly open vein of crushing, contradictory emotion. It is a record that, at once, it makes you fear for the sanity of the writer and yet be incredibly thankful that someone had the courage to so openly address issues that indie rock all too often ignores, or deals with only when doused in a safety coating of hipster obfuscation and irony, frozen by the fear of commitment, of real meaning, of saying something that could be taken down and used as unfriendly future evidence when the wind turns.

Ostensibly, The Midnight Organ Fight falls neatly into the classic break-up album category, not a genre lacking in members. But this is not a cliché ridden sop to some vague image of idealised love that exists only in hindsight. This is a self-lacerating paean to that all-too-real whirligig of regret, confusion, mourning and misunderstanding that accompanies the drawn out death of a relationship. It portrays in all its stark glory the paralysing disorientation that follows the dropping away of what you thought was the world, and of the first timid steps that follow the realisation that you are the only person stopping the building of a new one. It is so real it smarts, basically. It is nothing less than a still-beating, cracked heart lain out on the dissection table.

Viewed in this way, the music’s obvious anthemics become a boon rather than a flaw. When dealing so directly with emotion this bald, technical sideshows and attention grabbing song structures become another form of retraction – how much braver it is to lay out lyrics like The Modern Leper’s

‘Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg’

on top of a chorus that instantly burrows its way into your skull, rather than bury them beneath layers of self-gratifying noise and cowardly experimentation. This is an album that deals with a pain and a healing that is universal, and it is entirely appropriate, if not necessary, that it should do so within a musical context that is equally accessible. Even if it does sound a bit like Snow Patrol.

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