shooting-himself-in-the-foot/putting-his-foot-in-his-mouth, a bizarre love triangle of logorrheic metaphor.  It’s part of his charm, really, this tendency to write down, rehearse, sing, and record all the crazy sentences that pop into his head.  Take this one, from “The Wrestle,” in which Hutchison battles a large fish:

“My enemy please stay close to me/
I’ve no breath left, you cold breath thief.”

And, what the heck:

“I’m torn limb from limb/
There is bone, there is gristle and spit/
In the clothesless wrestle with the clothesless animal.”

Sounds like he lost the fight.  You wouldn’t know it from the inconsiderately upbeat music.  Like most of the Rabbit’s songs, “The Wrestle” starts small and snowballs into an anthemic wall of sound, picking up background vocals, string arrangements, and presumably the band’s discarded body parts all clanging together to rage against… something.  It’s not always easy to tell what’s at stake, whether Hutchison’s fighting for Life or Love or, you know, Meaning.  He seems to have given up on Dignity long ago–

“Upon waking up post-operation I found I had come in a dream again”

–but whatever he’s fighting for, it inspires hopelessly endearing music.  Being Scottish helps too.  The other part of Hutchison’s charm is his accent, and if Glasvegas have taught us anything, it’s that a Scottish accent atones for all manner of lyrical sins.  Couple his voice with the melodies, which sound ripped from the same chipper highlands as the Proclaimers’, and even the most absurd lines come off with spirited irony, as though Hutchison knows things aren’t as bad as he lets on.  Wordless background vocals float over from Enya records, while drummer Grant Hutchison bashes out his brother’s songs like Pebbles and Bamm Bamm just home from Bedrock High School.    So even when Hutchison sings something like,

“First it bleeds then it scabs/
I feel like a hemophiliac”

–all the elements fuse into a sound that’s uplifting in spite of itself.  There are even a couple songs where Hutchison and the band sound HAPPY.  “Nothing Like You” (the one with that icky dream) rocks as sleekly as Sonic Youth doing “Teenage Riot,” and “Living in Colour” contains the CD’s most triumphant line:

“Though I dreamt with a rapid eye/
By day I hoped to rapidly die.”

Just kidding!  Actually, the triumphant line comes from the song’s bouncy refrain:

“Living in colour!  Living in colour!/
I can see the paint on your toes!”

Painted toes might not seem like much, but Scott Hutchison should embrace whichever pleasures keep him out of the pine box.  Frightened Rabbit’s gift is sublimating images of despair into pretty music that’s refreshingly giddy, even funny.  They allow us to laugh at our own anguish.  Smart idea, yes?  Wouldn’t you like to laugh at your own anguish?  And isn’t it possible that their audience includes thousands of equally troubled people, each with their own problems and anatomical obsessions, and also many animals?