Artist: Meursault
Album: Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues
Label: Song, by Toad
I've had this awful levitating nausea all week. I did have a heavy weekend, admittedly, but this has been something else, like my spinal fluid was rotten with outside influence. My toenails felt sick. It also manifested in this peculiar feeling that the lower half of my skull was made of mahogany - at times my neck was utterly frozen and it made me lurch uncontrollably. Christ. Curse those burgers I ate at Donington all those years ago... All of which is to say I've barely listened to anything for the best part of five days. Haven't been able to; haven't wanted to. A peculiar situation considering how generally sodden I am with music.
Well, this Meursault record was the first thing I came back to. Maybe it was the newgrown ears, but it sounded so fresh. I'd fallen for some of the tracks anyway, but the first thing I noticed on this listen was the production. It's resolutely lo-fi, but it has so much space and odd dynamics: different instruments rise to the top of the mix, and the lack of the curse of compression means you get coils of sound reaching out to you; Neil Pennycock's voice - a chameleonic thing of creaks and anguished cracked hosannas - sits behind the sound, at times merely another sonic frequency fighting for purchase then becoming a howling thing. Perhaps we're just inured to shit production these days but to hear emotion expressed sonically, instead of planted before you like an exhibit, seemed a real novelty.
Having said all that it's the songs that count - and they just keep coming. 'Salt Part 1', the album's opener sets the tone. It's built around what sounds like a backwards wheezing accordion line and a drum beat that goes from a flickering thing to an off beat thud. It slides into a squall of guitars and synths which gives way to 'Statues of Strangers' an acoustic vignette of quiet beauty. 'The Furnace', which follows, nearly trips over itself in on its onrush, the mandolin line working against a screed of oddly manipulated guitars. Some of which might suggest this is a noisy record, which I guess it is; but it's the melodies that live with you, that and Pennycock's plaintive wail.
I've heard The Postal Service mentioned many times in relation to Pissing on Bonfires... and the comparison is there for sure - there is the same poise and juddering upthrust; but for me a closer comparison is the bedroom symphonies of Matt Adam Hart, the one man librettist behind The Russian Futurists. This has the same otherworldliness, the same integrity and ambition.
All this and I've not even mentioned the best tracks, the buzzing joy of the title track that works against the wail of the lyrics ('I wont pine for you, I wont wait to be told to run), 'A Small Stretch of Land' that manages to sound beamed in and a traditional all at once...
To top it all, it's released by a truly independent label, set up by someone who believed in the record so much as to want to release it himself. I can see why.
So in praise of being able to hear clearly once more, I say go and buy the damn thing. It's a belter.
Download: Meursault - Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing with Tongues
Download: Meursault - A Small Stretch of Land
A live session for Song, by Toad.
Posted by poacher
in music reviews
at
14:33
| Comments (0)
| Trackbacks (0)
