At this point, Meursault have little name recognition beyond the borders of Edinburgh or Hype Machine. But All Creatures Will Make Merry, a more developed and thoughtful follow-up to their craggy 2008 debut, Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, could change that. Don't let the album title fool you: Like fellow Scots Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad, Meursault are ambassadors of misery, self-loathing, and huge, heart-heavy choruses. Most sad bastards can generate a modicum of optimism on January 1. But on "Crank Resolutions", the sadder bastards in Meursault declare, "I broke down on New Year's Day/ And I mixed my drinks/ And I lost my way," among hyperventilating electronic beats and pyrrhic victory shouts. It's enormous fun, of course, and I can't wait to see a live audience sob along to every word.
Throughout Merry, the seven-piece band busts out pitter-pattered drums, string swells, banjo solos, and rousing refrains. But Meursault largely retain the intimacy of their origins as the solo project of Neil Pennycook. His voice is confident and warm-timbred, but he always sounds a shade short of losing his mind, and his grim intensity makes even a garden-variety acoustic folk number like "Weather" compelling. With only voice, ukulele, and a blanket of lint, the fragile "One Day This'll All Be Fields" is a desperate-- and devastating-- little song.
As you might suspect, Neutral Milk Hotel supplies Meursault with plenty of ideas: "And we will descend from the sky/ And we will bury you alive," Pennycook sings like gospel on "Fields". But it would be churlish to fault any band in 2010 for mining the sonics, sincerity, even the iconography, of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, particularly when they do it well and make it their own. Clenched teeth, furious strum, bodies falling, souls salvaged-- all belong to a shared language anyone reading this review anywhere in the world already knows like a native tongue.
