"They came, they swore, they conquered..."

Sometimes - not nearly often enough - you're sufficiently fortunate to be in the room when a group truly arrives, when everything clicks and audience and band realise pretty much simultaneously that this is a significant moment, a point of departure to some glorious future point. Frightened Rabbit at the Queen's Hall last Tuesday was emphatically one of those exceptional nights. Here is my Herald review of the gig from last Thursday's paper. (It's a 5-star review, by the way. The subs must have let one slip off the page). And I didn't have room to point out that support band Meursault were brilliant.

FRIGHTENED RABBIT

QUEEN’S HALL
GRAEME THOMSON

★★★★

Judging by the ovation that greeted Frightened Rabbit as they ambled on stage, as well as the way in which the words to almost every song were roared back at them by a sell-out crowd, this Glasgow-based band have truly arrived. They played like it, too, imbuing their stirring electric folk songs with an intensity and depth that made the versions on last year’s superb album, The Midnight Organ Fight, sound almost anaemic by comparison.

A scattering of excellent new material whetted the appetite for the next record, but it was the old favourites that the crowd had come to hear, greeting each one like a dear friend. The beautiful "Backwards Walk", with its blunt depiction of romantic turmoil – “You’re the shit and I’m knee deep in it” – became an unlikely anthem, and by the time sweat-soaked singer and songwriter Scott Hutchison came on with an acoustic guitar for an unamplified solo encore of "Poke", he didn’t need to open his mouth at all. They came, they swore, they conquered.