Meursault: All Creatures Will Make Merry transcends everything

Crank Resolutions mp3 Meursault All Creatures Will Make Merry …. buy it
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Meursault’s sophomore album, All Creatures Will Make Merry, has carried me away. No, I take that back. It has dragged me away, far away from all the other music in my inbox and on my iphone and in my music library. This is truly the album that we, who are true fans of this band, have been waiting for, and wishing would come sooner to our doorstep. Those of you lucky enough to live within touring distance of this young band have perhaps seen the evolution of these songs. I’ve heard rumors and snippets. I’ve followed their silvery snail trails as experiments were made, as acoustic sets happened. Musicians were added to the mix, more songs were written, Neil fiddled and futzed, I’m sure. All Creatures Will Make Merry emerges as a very personal yet also transcendent collection.

Not completely set in folkish traditions, many of these songs are more electrified, more experimental than their debut, Pissing of Bonfires, Kissing With Tongues. The production is rough at times, distortion reigns at places that are uncomfortably accepted before the galloping percussion carries it all away and you forget just how odd it sounded at first. This is not pretty, pretty indie music. It’s got it’s charm but it lies under a cloak of screeching and ticking and chiming electronics and when you figure that out and come to love it, you love it exactly because of all that. For those of you who admit a wide variety of music to your library, All Creatures Will Make Merry will have you racking your brain to identify the influences and sounds. If you’re a one genre pony, open your ears and admit this album; give it more than one listen; it will win you over. I’m immediately struck by the very bare voice set against that opening chord which then unfolds into oh so much more sound and complexity on “Payday.” It’s a short little song, a prelude, and it makes your ear ready for the way you’re to feel about the story told in “Crank Resolutions” before Neil lets out a yell and the musicians are let loose on you.

I don’t use the word transcendent lightly. The bit about All Creatures Will Make Merry being personal is obvious. The songs are lyrically about friendship and leavings, and bitterness and isolation and loss. I’d call that personal. Transcendent is harder to prove. But honestly, listen to the quiet lulls when the acoustic guitar and Neil’s voice echo out into the space just waiting there for it. Hear the wailing chorus of “Another” as they harmonize their way to the end of something that in and of itself is only a song, but broadcast to all of us, is a truth that stands on its own. Play it again. It will produce a similar feeling on the second time around. Play it for your friend. Play it for a stranger. Its truth is contained within its own existence, you see. It’s not simply subject to your own personal hearing. Now this might be true of many songs. But this is most certainly true of the music on Meursault’s beautifully done record.

Gadamer, writing on Hegel, tells us, “The light in which all truth is seen is cast from consciousness’s becoming clear about itself.” It’s as if the distillation of our collective thoughts have imparted a distinct truth to things. That’s what transcendence is about. But in order to be transcendent a thing has to also know where it comes from and to what it was once bound. Meursault’s music surely is no longer tethered to it’s Scottish plain. This record propels them to a wider and greater field, and I think knowing that is what makes me feel so strongly about it. The moment I put it in my car stereo I choked up, and soon had to pull over and just listen, tears running down my face. It’s simply so beautiful, and I’m so very proud of them. But All Creatures Will Make Merry is not an album about Neil or any of the people in Meursault (though all of them are gifted and perfectly chosen members of this band,) it is an album about beauty and the kind of essential beauty that we all instinctively understand as it stems from the human condition. It’s somber and dark and self-reflective. And as the last phrase of the last song ends so abruptly I realize how small each of us are. And that is as it should be. The music, of course, exists beyond us. xoxo

photo credit: Blueback Hotrod http://bluebackhotrod.com/