Edinburgh band Meursault‘s 2008 debut Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues fused together folk and electronic music resulting in a unique and brilliant sound. Their sophomore effort All Creatures Will Make Merry is equally unique but ultimately grander.

The album shows its urgency with opening track ‘Payday’. Lead singer and songwriter Neil Pennycook’s foghorn voice grabs you instantly as over a whiring harmonium. ‘Payday’ then launches into the epic ‘Crank Resolutions’ which hits you at a rate of knots; a tale of feeling forlorn on New Years Day accompanied by thunderous percussion and soaring electronica is an urgent and rapturous way to start the album. ‘All Creatures Will Make Merry’ features its fair share of epic tracks in a similar vein to ‘Crank Resolutions’. The title track is a more restrained number but equally as grandiose while standout track ‘What You Don’t Have’ is a soaring mixture of drum samples, strings and Pennycook’s exquisite lyrics (“it’s not about what you don’t have, it’s the little you’re given and how far you can run with it”). An ode to a German artist of the enfants terribles variety in the form of ‘A Song for Martin Kippenberger’ is the album’s most audacious and ambitious song. A multitude of slow building instrumentation erupts in Pennycook’s vocals announcing “please don’t send me home” in a truly magical and hypnotic fashion.

All Creatures Will Make Merry is really brought together by its quieter moments such as ‘Sleet’, ‘Weather’ and ‘One Day This Will All Be Fields’ with the latter sounding like an old 1920’s recording played on a gramophone. These songs truly demonstrate how brilliant the songsmithery of Meursault is. The closing song ‘A Fair Exchange’ which is a heartbreaking piano lead lament amplifies this with a haunting quality and lines as cutting as “some things take time, and some things time will take”.

The juxtaposition of the epic soaring songs and the folk lead acoustic numbers really gives the album a great balance. However, the production is reminiscent of Mount Eerie, Microphones and early Mountain Goats and works wonderfully on the acoustic numbers but often leads me wondering what songs such as ‘Crank Resolutions’ would sound like if not recorded in an ‘epic lo-fi’ fashion. It doesn’t take anything away from the album and it will no doubt endear a lot of people to the artistic value that it creates but I feel that songs of the caliber of ‘What You Don’t Have’ and ‘Crank Resolutions’ deserve to sound as immaculate as the songwriting that created them.

All Creatures Will Make Merry announces Meursault as one of the best bands in Scotland. The musicianship and songwriting is outstanding, it’s just a shame that sometimes this talent is not hammered home as much as it could have been. They are definitely a band that will keep you guessing and always produce something unexpected and exciting. Surely that is why we fall in love with bands such as Meursault. I already cannot wait for the follow up.