| CRITIC SCORE 73 Based on 7 reviews WHAT DO YOU THINK?
|
If these songs are any indication, things will stay as gloriously sad as ever, but gain some sonic strength and polish.
State Hospital is the sound of a band renewed, invigorated and impassioned and pretty damned far from selling out.
The ‘State Hospital’ EP is, thankfully, a return to the sort of form that once had singer Scott Hutchison touted as one of the UK’s most expressive lyricists.
Even if four of these five songs on State Hospital are just castaways not included on the next year’s record, this EP still manages to flow just fine on its own.
It’s still pretty dark, but this isn’t weepy music, unlike some previous recordings; it’s well-rounded and welcoming, which is possibly attributed to the band sharing songwriting duties with Hutchison for the first time.
These are uniformly above the quality you might expect from Frightened Rabbit b-sides, and if these are the off-cuts from the album then we can hope for another solid release from the Scotsmen, to say the least.
Never too far from what you might expect from the band, yet presented in an emotionally and sonically cohesive way that makes the songs here come off as unnecessarily simplified.
