All Creatures Will Make Merry - Meursault

Track List:

1 Payday
2 Crank Resolutions
3 All Creatures Will Make Merry... Under Pain of Death
4 Weather
5 One Day This'll All Be Fields
6 What You Don't Have
7 Another
8 New Ruin
9 Sleet
10 Song for Martin Kippenberger
11 A Fair Exchange

Running time: 45 minutes
Released: 2010

So this is going to be interesting. I only have vague impressions of this album - and not liking it much. Why I picked it up, my initial though was that I was on a kick for all things Scottish finding a lot of great low-fi folk and indie on LastFM, but this released to late to be in the wave of purchases that followed those discoveries. No idea how this will work out, so lets find out!

The opening is dark - footsteps... but that tone is lost with the first note, which introduces mournfulness. It is a strange opening, especially given that plus some indistinct backing is all there is to Payday.

Crank Resolutions has more to it, but there is an odd distance about the sound - both the vocal and the music behind it seem removed from their present somehow. I do not recognise this at all despite somehow having racked up 40+ plays of Meursault over 4 years. There is an electronic edge to this - not at all what I was expecting. It's not bad. Meursault are named for the protagonist in L'Etranger by Camus. This does not predispose me to like them - having to read that book, in the original French, was one of the hardest and dullest things I had to do at school. I can see why they might have chosen the name, and I guess it adds an artistic choice to the distance between the listener and the sounds recorded. Particularly the vocal, which is very muted, distant on each track so far. It is not a technique that I have (consciously) heard used a lot and it gives this album a stand out feature.

I have to say, I am enjoying this a lot more than I thought I would before I started. 

There is a touch of Admiral Fallow about Weather, another Scottish indie-folk band so I guess it is not that much of a surprise. I am not keen on the muted strings or the lyric/delivery of One Day This'll All Be Fields though the song just does nothing for me and the sounds which accompany its denouement are ugly... presaging the next track which is really rather too off-key as it launches. Nor does it improve noticeably, consisting mostly of the same distant vocal and a very bland driving rhythm.

Another swaps one bland for another (I see what I did there). This time a bland guitar melody. However in this case the blandness of the accompaniment helps the distinctive vocal style because there is no competition for attention. It makes the voice more distinct whilst keeping the distance that has characterised the album. The problem I find with the song is that whilst it has a strong character, it does not seem to have a strong heart - I find that despite finding the vocal line very clear and well delivered (I like the distance, I have decided), having just finished listening to it I could not tell you a single lyric from it. The actual content thus proves forgettable, even as  - or perhaps because - the style is very memorable.

New Ruin may be my favourite track on this album. There is good drive, neat instrumentation, decent electronics and the same vocal delivery that has marked the other tunes. Lyrically it is still unremarkable to the point of blank memory but the different elements that Meursault have shown through the disc are combined here to produce a tune I really like. 

I have finally realised what the distant vocal reminds me of: Pink Floyd's The Wall. It is a strange bedfellow, because the tone here is very different to that double album, generally speaking. There is far less anger on show. Reinforcing the idea that Meursault are odd ducks is the ode to Martin Kippenberger. It starts with great momentum but dies off and runs too long, but at least I have now heard of a hard-drinking German artist who died young. Good trade?

The album ends quietly, and that is probably a fair indication that the album has peaks and troughs. Overall it is a decent work, with a couple of disappointments and a real high point. There is a pretty strong character to the disc with the vocal style flowing through the whole thing. I thought I might be cutting this before I listened to it, but having done so, there is no call for that.