Meursault – Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues

The music press may prefer lionising Glasgow's certain own Jesus & Mary Chain of Broken Britain, but Scotland is proving pretty good all round at producing dramatic, elegaic yet emotionally howling bands and not all as retrogressive - Kilsyth's The Twilight Sad, Selkirk's Frightened Rabbit, Glasgow's We Were Promised Jetpacks and now, following fellow Edinburghians Broken Records and from right out of next to nowhere, the debut album by Meursault, lynchpins of the nascent local Bear Scotland collective. Interesting proposition, they, mixing lo-fi electronica with emotive folk-rock deploying all manner of ukeleles, banjos and so forth behind Neil Pennycook's plaintive, cracked wail - not dissimilar to Broken Records' Jamie Sutherland in more than just locale, actually - while keeping both Postal Service-alike ground level suspicions and the dead hand of Tunng-sponsored 'folktronica' well away from the door.What sets Meursault apart from such attempts to meld Warp and Fence is the way they seamlessly switch between programmed elements and the very human pastorally inclined 'real' instruments, so the album kicks off with the processed beats and washes of analogue keyboards of 'Salt Part 1', on which Pennycook makes like Win Butler in the snowstorm amid clattering peaks and troughs that build on creating tension and release as delicate electric piano lines, stacked and filtered wordless backing vocals and scuzzy, feedbacking guitars lurk around the back of the mix without ever making it sound cluttered or overfussy. ('Salt Part 2', which comes later, is a ukelele an accordion backed lovelorn lament, albeit one that promises "your tears, they are water and water will turn to salt") Then it's into 'Statues Of Strangers', which starts with howling feedback before lapsing into just over two minutes of delicate banjo over synth washes and electrical hum that undermine any calming effect ahead of 'The Furnace', where computer noise battles with mandolins and Pennycook's bleak howl from somewhere out the back. The title track, amid the skyscraping synths and double-thwacked rhythm, resembles Modest Mouse at heart, although Isaac Brock rarely countenances thoughts like "I will count my fucking blessings that I am even here at all, and I'll take comfort in each misery and cherish each stumble, each fall... I won't pray for you, I won't long for your safe return". At no point does any of this mix and matchery seem like it's been put together for the sake of it, never letting up on a human connection that reaches its atmospheric crescendo with the emotional heft of 'The Dirt And The Roots', the closest they come to that Big Music banner Mike Scott of the Waterboys coined many years ago to describe such full-figured, quasi-earnest folky revelry, immediately followed by the autoharp and bleeps of 'A Few Kind Words' as if it were the most natural mix in the world. Then, 'A Small Stretch Of Land' meanwhile could well be a stowaway from the Fence Collective. Such is the shifting ease of the band demonstrated again.That's the key to how Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues - great, if mildly unseemly, title, by the way - works so well, that despite the disprite elements somehow it all flows together like a complete album should. Does it have direct contemporaries? You could easily argue that Thom Yorke's The Eraser did similar things with electrics and plangent acoustic handwringing but with much less joie de vivre. You're more likely to think of a laptop enabled Band Of Horses, or perhaps more accurately underrated Oxford post-folkies Jonquil. Whatever, so carefully constructed is it that take away any of the keyboard arpeggios, flinty stringed instrumentation or the bruised warmth of Pennycook's voice gutting out the carcass of the heart and it wouldn't be half as effective or affecting. Very rarely less than intriguing, compelling and not a little sublimely surprising, Meursault can rightfully take their place as progenitors of 2008's last great album. 86%Meursault on Myspace