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. Continue Reading