Four years on from the release of Crow Hill, it’s great to be able to report that the sixth Meursault album is finally with us. Hopefully, you’ve already heard ‘Laugh Track‘ and ‘Making The Most Of The Raw Materials Of Futility.’ The two tracks from this excellent album to do the rounds ahead of the album release should have given the idea that this is something special.
Neil Pennycook has been leading Meursault in various iterations since 2006, and he’s received critical acclaim and sold a reasonable amount of records (though nothing like the amount he should have done). Coming out of the same Edinburgh scene that has also given us Broken Records, Withered Hand and (seemingly on hiatus, sadly) eagleowl, his wonderful blend of electronica and folk music (I don’t think many of us are terribly comfortable with the ‘folktronica’ label, are we? perhaps not entirely unreasonably) has continued to cast its magic over those who hear it, whether on record or live. Much like Aidan Moffat, I suspect that should he run out of ideas, he could record a shopping list and it would leave listeners hearts broken.
The idea of the concept album has been to hell and back over the past sixty years, alternatively offering a chance for rock music to show how clever it could be and at other extremes seen as so pretentious that it had to be treated with suspicion, even outright derision. Mr Pennycook (funnily enough, he actually hails from the Scottish market town of Penicuik) has managed to produce an album that started out as a concept album, dialled some of it back and left us with a little over half an hour as a complete work that stands up with the best he has produced over nearly 20 years. While the character of Meursault (named after the anti-hero from Camus’ The Outsider, but not based on him) features throughout the record, it’s the themes of the songs that have remained, rather than the concept.
And what songs they are! It’s a deeply personal work – a sense in which you feel that questioning too deeply would open too many wounds and confront too many ghosts. Certain phrases leap out at you – in ‘WOLF!!’ (sic), the idea that unlike the boy from Aesop’s fable ‘When I cried wolf, there was a wolf every time.’ The mantra of ‘Meursault’ (the track) ‘If you’ve nothing nice to say, try singing it to me.’ Perhaps strongest of all are the album’s opener ‘Rats In The Corn’ which serves as the last voice on the BBC before everything went dark, or the closing ‘Teacher, Was I Wrong To Burn’ with its themes of suicide, which leave the listener feeling that they have been caught reading someone’s personal diaries, and left with too many questions that they dare not ask.
Yet it may surprise you that it’s not a bleak record because its beauty transcends it all. Amazingly, he’s done it again. Now let us hope that the majority of the record-buying public catch up. Me? I’ll be in a corner somewhere. I’m not crying, you’re crying…
