Music

Meursault

Mike Williams | Thursday 22 July, 2010 22:20

With his band tagged as downbeat and introspective, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Meursault main man Neil Pennycook might be something of a sourpuss. Not so, it seems. “I’m quite chipper actually,” he says merrily down a crackly line from Glasgow, where he’s recording with a pal. “People assume because of my voice and the way I sing that I’m somehow in pain or tortured, but if you listen to the lyrics, they’re not always that dark.” Not always, but often. Debut LP Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues is a brilliantly brooding and cheerless ride of gloomy rumination that earned comparisons with Arcade Fire and introduced the world beyond their Edinburgh garden to an epic landscape of folky multi-instrumentation and precise and measured bleeps and bangs.
Recently released follow-up All Creatures Will Make Merry sticks to the script, cranking up the ambition and the joy (“There’s even a love song on it!”) while remaining faithful to their lo-fi upbringing in a swathe of beats, noodles, strums and howls. As with their previous effort, the latest long-player comes courtesy of Scottish indie Song, By Toad. “It’s the perfect place for us to be right now,” reckons Pennycook. “They’ve used the template of labels like Fence and Chemikal Underground, and everything works. There’s no reason for us to want to be anywhere else.” And the dark tag? “Drowned in Sound called us “a troubled mind or six”. I’m not sure I want my mum to read that! I don’t want her asking me if I’m disturbed.”

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