Detour presents: Meursault / Happy Particles @ Glasgow Science Centre (Planetarium)

Meursault / Happy Particles at Glasgow Science Centre Planetarium (****)
Sunday October 9
live review for the skinny

The planetarium isn't just a novel location for the sake of gimmickry, since a certain brand of rock music routinely provokes descriptions like "star-gazing" or "cosmic" and can feel emotionally profound in the same vague, mindclutter-emptying way as staring at the stars.

Sunday's first band Happy Particles fit the bill perfectly: even without a domed ceiling of stars and planets above them, they might fairly be described as a space-rock band. Before they start, the seated crowd is treated to a brief introduction to astronomy by planetarium staff member Simon, who amusingly talks to all us trendy music types like we're six years old again. "Look out for Geoff the Whale!" he tells us, before the stars above start to orbit the room, and Happy Particles slowly shift between chords.

Theirs is not a clean or intricate game, preferring to play in the mud of indistinct guitar noise and heavily processed vocals, but it’s perfect for right now, gazing at flickering stars, what looks like Mars, and some dubiously drawn constellations (how can you get a dog from two dots?). Happy Particles should never perform in a wee bar again; please, talk to Simon about a residency.

Meursault, perennial kings of Edinburgh’s gentle acoustic scene, could be a less appropriate choice for a setting that encourages us to consider infinite size, and the closer, a sparse take on ‘...Fields’ familiar to any fan, is somewhat swallowed by the "endless canopy" above it. But the new songs that dominate tonight's set reveal a heavier sound than ever before, which fills the room, if not the universe. Neil Pennycook’s songwriting has taken an angry turn, so his bandmates wallop the drums and strangle the guitars, but Pennycook’s voice is still a versatile emotional tool, and some of the new piano melodies are startlingly pretty. Meursault may benefit from more intimate venues, but Detour deserve a lot of credit for thinking outside the pub.

Meursault, Olympic Swimmers, Conquering Animal Sound @ Cab Vol, 10/4

Conquering Animal Sound (***) spend half of their time on-stage crouched, and if you're at the front you can see why: pedals and knobs, wires and cables, gizmos and toys on the floor. It's fascinating to watch the Edinburgh duo use their array of devices to build up a song: they make a noise, loop it, pick something else up and loop it too, singer Anneke Kampman miaows and Jamie Scott fingerpicks his guitar and those sounds are looped; and six minutes later the pathwork is complete, it drops to silence, and there's huge cheers. Tonight their four rolling collages could do with a few more focal points, but it's clear to see why CAS are picking up plaudits.

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In contrast, Glasgow quintet Olympic Swimmers (***) are pretty conventional, being a five-piece indie-rock band in the vein of Yo La Tengo, female lead singer aside. Like the New Jersey band, Swimmers' slow, brooding songs don't exactly set pulses racing live, and they are also apparently handicapped tonight by the absence of their usual rhythm section. Final song Father Said is the standout, redeeming a somewhat sleepy set by growing from a tenuous start towards an epic, shimmering finale. More songs like this please.

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Finally it's Meursault's (*****) turn to launch their second album All Creatures Will Make Merry in front of a hometown crowd so keen the venue sold out almost a week ahead. They opt for the slightly risky strategy of playing the new album in full, despite few of the songs being known to anyone, but it's clear from the off how focused they all are on their performances. Sparse ballads, where singer Neil Pennycook is backed by just a cello and toy guitar, are interspersed with songs with racing beats and abrasive textures, and each one is met with roars at the end. On this form, Meursault are nothing short of awe inspiring.

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Meursault - New Ruin (Live at the Queen's Hall) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

Meursault: Escape From Auld Reekie

feature for the skinny
(crappy photo taken by me on my phone about a year ago at The Bowery)

In the 16th century, after defeat at the Battle of Flodden, Edinburgh built a wall around its limits to protect itself from an expected invasion by the English. They never came, but the Flodden Wall proved useful to the city's rulers as a means of penning citizens in, making criminals easier to catch and traders easier to tax. The wall is mostly gone, but some mysterious force still seems to pen the capital's musical citizens in.

Every August, Edinburgh becomes the cultural capital of the western world, yet its own contemporary music rarely travels far. For two years, the chatter around these parts has been dominated by Meursault, and if you've been to a small-scale gig here recently, you've probably seen them. Meursault have performed live hundreds of times now and won new fans every time. Our readers poll saw their debut album, Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, qualify as one of the best Scottish albums of the last ten years. But despite their obvious talent, the hype has remained dispiritingly local.

It's time they burst through the wall.

For the uninitiated, Meursault are a six-piece (formerly four-piece) led by singer-songwriter Neil Pennycook, a big bald guy with a breathtaking boom of a voice. Other members combine autoharp-strumming with Ableton-programming, korg-playing and banjo-picking: they play modern forms of indie-rock and electronica, but with strong roots in Scottish folk. Pennycook has a versatile voice, but when he yells, jaws drop.

We caught up with Neil to hear more about Meursault's upcoming second album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.

How did you want your second album to be different from the first?
The main difference would be that I'm a lot more certain of what it is that I'm trying to say with these songs compared with those on the first record. If I've learned anything, it's to trust my own opinion and to work at my own pace. Also, playing with a full live band has helped shape this record considerably.

Do you mean - expanding to a six-piece?
Yeah. The two new members, Pete on cello and Phil on guitar, have opened up a huge range of possibilities with these songs. As well as other less obvious benefits such as Phil also acting as our booking agent which brings a whole new level of organisation to things. With Pete joining it gave me the opportunity to work closely with someone who understands music from a completely different perspective than myself, what with his being classically trained and his ability to understand every facet of a song as he hears it.

What would you say your influences have been for this record?
I've been listening to a lot of The Microphones, Mount Eerie. And I guess that's influenced my production style a fair bit.

How do you expect people will react?
I hope people get what I was trying to achieve with the production and arrangements as well. It's this idea that just because a song has a grander arrangement, or is more than just guitar, bass and drums, that shouldn't necessarily entail that it needs slick production, which always seems to be the case and has been for as long as people have been making records.

Edinburgh's happy to have Meursault, but logistical problems have undoubtedly played a part in keeping them here. They're signed to a bedroom-sized local label, Song By Toad, better known as a blog run by Matthew Young, and there's only so much he can do. And with six members, co-ordinating time off work to tour has proved extremely difficult. Hence most of their gigs in the last couple years have been in the homely Bowery basement, downstairs at what is now the Roxy. They were able to rehearse there regularly, and played so often they became like an unofficial house band. Just around the corner from the Bowery, on Drummond St, is a still-standing portion of the Flodden Wall. They're very close to getting beyond it.

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Wickerman Festival 2009

Wickerman Festival, Dundrennan, 24-25 July
festival review for the skinny

Strangely, but thankfully, the Wickerman Festival near Dumfries is a Friday-Saturday weekender, not a Saturday-Sunday affair. That's fortunate because when The Skinny got up on Sunday morning to pack up the tents and head home, the gusting winds and lashing rain soaked us skinwards within minutes. We were lucky - other than some brief showers on Friday afternoon, Wickerman was blessed with long spells of gentle sunshine, particularly on Saturday. All music festivals are dependent somewhat on favourable weather, but it seems particularly important for Wickerman, because this year's packed line-up was still pretty bare of appealing acts. That puts more emphasis on the ancillary pleasures of camping and drinking with friends, and on the non-musical entertainment, because there's fewer bands to get excited about. In theory, at least; we got excited about plenty of bands.

Much of our weekend was spent in the Solus Tent, a long and narrow marquee dedicated to up-and-coming Scottish bands. But when we first walk in 5 minutes before the start of Meursault, it's completely empty bar the sound guy. Singer Neil Pennycook isn't a quiet performer, so his bellowing voice soon draws people in to a set which focuses on highlights from last year's debut album. As great as that record is, it's new song Crank Resolutions which has been the standout of recent sets, its pulsing beats and racing rhythm contrasting with Pennycook's distressed vocals.

The Seventeenth Century play to a slightly bigger crowd, but they leave me unconvinced. They seem to adhere very closely to the Arcade Fire's eloquent brand of melodrama, using long maudlin violin lines and wailing vocal outros to convey a vague melancholy that doesn't quite match the mood of the evening. Perhaps they'd suit a dusky bar setting, but their self-seriousness today doesn't connect.

On the other hand, the always-impressive We Were Promised Jetpacks know exactly how to play to a festival crowd. They warm us up with, eh, Keeping Warm, and then Quiet Little Voices entices the quiet little crowd to begin using their own, eh, voices, in support. By the fourth song everyone has got it, so wild finale Short Bursts is served to a crowd on the verge of climax. It's a perfect set closer, shifting between quiet and loud moments with ecstatic energy. Jetpacks are getting better with every gig.

Headliners The Human League bring a touch of glamour to this very modest festival. Singers Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall still look gorgeous 30 years into their careers, while Phil Oakey commands the stage in a tight black lab coat, looking like a slender Dr Evil. They reel out hit after hit -- Tell Me When, Love Action, Open Your Heart, Seconds, Mirror Man -- and to finish, Don't You Want Me, which is incredible, of course. Even those who came with high expectations left fully enamoured.

Saturday's schedule kicks off with a Solus tent show from Bronto Skylift, who are really not the kind of band you want to soundtrack your hangover. So instead of being gently eased back into life, we're smacked around the chops by the savagely loud Glasgow duo, who play their instruments like they're trying to kill them. In "the closest thing we'll ever get to a love song", screeching feedback and vicious drumming underpin what I think is the repeated romantic yell "I'm a tiger, I'm a tiger!". A family with three young kids look a little perplexed, but three cooler boys aged about 10 start their own moshpit at the front. Shame on us for leaving them to start it.

The afternoon provides a good opportunity to sample some non-musical fare. Down at the spoken word tent, a middle aged man recites Bill Maher's comedy routine about translating rap lyrics into "white" - watch that here - and then tried a rap of his own, which we'll generously call 'spirited'. Then we try the nine-hole crazy golf, which was only crazy insofar as it was pitch 'n putt with no putters and no fairways. So the first 20 minutes were spent looking for missing balls in deep, rough grass, and the next few minutes were spent trying to tap them into the hole with sand wedges. A once-over with a lawnmower, and some putters, would've made the golf far more enjoyable.

Back at the main stage were Norwich's The Kabeedies, who fulfilled just about every stereotype of meaningless art school post-punk you can think of. They looked cool and they danced a lot, but their patter was terrible. "How do you pronounce this place, is it Dun... Dun... Dundrennan?". Not. Hard. "She hit me on the arm, I have a bruise! That's amazing!". Not. Amazing.

Candi Staton seems to be best known now for her vocal on The Source's 1991 hit You Got The Love, but her biggest solo hit was Young Hearts Run Free, and in the late 60s she recorded some beautiful soul ballads, like What Would Become Of Me and I'm Just A Prisoner. But after trumpeting how many hours she'd travelled to be here, her set may as well have been torrented in. A lacklustre cover of Suspicious Minds is followed by a wedding singer performance of Stand By Your Man, cheapened to novelty status by a calypso beat. Clashes call.

Punch and the Apostles are much more fun, if a little ridiculous at times. Most of the time it's a cacophonous din, as each song is built up towards a big melodramatic climax and then brought down to earth again slowly while the saxophonist wails free-form solos. Occasionally, moments of glorious clarity break through the headache-inducing fug, suggesting that there is method behind the apparent madness after all.

But by far the best show of the day, and possibly of the whole weekend, was still to come: Drums of Death, in Solus, face painted like a zombie panda bear. He's hopping around a laptop and mixer, running to the barrier, working the crowd, rapping and singing, and I've no idea what he's saying but his beats are just brilliant. They seem to incorporate bits of everything -- electro which leans to Italo, to house, to punk, to techno, to grime, to indie-rock -- and he's putting everything into riling the crowd. There's a piano-based interlude, like recent LCD Soundsystem, which bangs back into life with astonishing force, and unbelievably he moves onto something even better. Who is this guy? He's called Colin, he's from Oban, and he's jaw-dropping live.

At midnight, the 30ft Wickerman which has stood watching over the site is ceremoniously set alight and fireworks are let off, but it's not the end of the festival yet. A DJ set from Utah Saints on the main stage is surprisingly brilliant, because their song selection is a perfect mix of big-hitters (Justice, The Killers, MGMT) and lesser-known maintenance beats. Finally, Edinburgh's William Douglas and the Wheel perform classic rock covers and originals to a raucous crowd in what was earlier the spoken word tent. We stumble back to the tents at 3am, actually get to them at 4 (don't ask), and thank the heavens for waiting until the end of the festival before unloading on us.

An Introduction: Meursault

feature for Clash

Ask any music fan around Edinburgh who their favourite new local band is, and there’s a fair chance you won’t get the same answer twice.

This is a boom time for a city which lags way behind bigger brother Glasgow in terms of musical heritage. At the forefront of the capital city’s efforts to catch up are Meursault, a foursome led by singer and songwriter Neil Pennycook, who released a superb but slept-on debut album late last year.

Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues was released at the height of year-end list season, meaning its many gushing reviews were quickly forgotten in the rush to put 2008 to bed and get on with 2009’s next big thing. But fans in Edinburgh didn’t forget - Pennycook is a big guy with a big heart and a big voice - why look for anyone else?

Though he tells me the word bugs him, we can’t proceed with a description of Meursault without talking about folk. Any group which uses banjo, ukelele, accordion and acoustic guitar, and which has songs that create mythologies around long-forgotten local heroes, is inevitably going to be associated with folk music. But that’s only a small part of the Meursault story, because they also use an assortment of electronic devices to add beats, beeps and rushes. Please, don’t call it folktronica - it’s much more fun than that.

Take ‘The Furnace’ for an example. “I was trying to write the catchiest, most infectious pop song with the weirdest bunch of instruments I could get my hands on,” Pennycook says, and he succeeded: it’s got a ridiculously catchy banjo melody sitting between skipping beats and abrasive scratching noise. Recent live shows under the side-project name Art Fag have demonstrated even more experimentation, with new influences like Holy Fuck and Animal Collective appearing. These recent shows have been stunning.

But then, when the noise subsists, Pennycook’s gift for straight-forward songwriting shines through. Songs like ‘Salt Pt.2’, ‘The Dirt And The Roots’, and ‘William Henry Miller’ from the ‘Nothing Broke EP’, are simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. “There’s not a lot of hard fact out there about him,” Pennycook says of the latter titular figure, “that’s why I like it, because you can piece things together and make your own pseudo-folklore.”

But perhaps their most impressive single feature is Pennycook’s unmistakable foghorn voice, which you can sometimes hear just wandering the Old Town streets, where you used to hear bagpipes. Now there’s a new way to seduce the tourists.