Meursault
I Will Kill Again

Say Meursault and I begin to reel off vintages and wines like a connoisseur of French bottles.

Wine lover? Me? I who swirl the glass on the table séance-style? No. Life has made me know a thing or two, life has made me acquainted with winemaking excellence, but it's the same life that has made me approach wine with the same cryptic gaze that people have with me when I start with Cage and Scelsi.

Talking about Camus? The cynical and apathetic Meursault, existential triumph of dark thought? I would say not even, but the protagonist of the book “The Stranger”, the Scottish band was inspired for a rather apt “naming.”

Almost ten years of activity and flashes of notoriety: Neil Pennycook and all those who followed, at the debut, get on several occasions so close to the mainstream but life tells them that nothing more can be done.

And so, bit by bit, quite acclaimed in Edinburgh, their hometown, a few months ago “I Will Kill Again” was printed, directly from Song, by Toad Records.

Here, I would start from the premise that the album, to date, is what has made me happiest in this first half of 2017.

Indeed, I'll play the oxymoron card: happily unhappy.

A melancholic and lost album, a surprise of stylistic intelligence, so much so that it manages not to create particular references. Okay, we're there, in that middle ground of independent folk singing, electronic, “low fi,” but how lovely, every now and then, to use these words with the same care with which they have turned them into sounds.

I think it's the best production I've listened to this year; I don't sense mannerisms, nor trends, nor insistence or redundancies. I feel nine songs that shine on their own, introduced by an instrumental curtain that opens slowly, with grace and dissonance, squeaks and relaxes, unsettles and accommodates while a voice enunciates I. Will. Kill. Again.

And this is the stylistic humus that accompanies the whole album, even when in "The Mill," one can sense, in a sort of blend between Coldplay and Red House Painters, that not always pleasant hint of the hit parade: just need a teenage TV series that throws the song in the ending credits and in an instant, you become the Death Cab for Cuties.

It doesn't happen but if it happens. No, it doesn't happen. Instead, it happens that every now and then it seems like listening to the son of Robbie Basho, Kurt Wagner, a seventies country cassette, a street protester, that sort of black angel with a soul on edge, practice revived by Anohni Hegarty.

It doesn't happen but if it happens that maybe I kill someone, I would want this album as the soundtrack of my trial.

Live stream of the album:
https://www.facebook.com/100015171962116/videos/211117792737285/