The album was recorded at Edinburgh’s Happiness Hotel studio with Song, By Toad’s Matthew Young, as well as a cast of supporting musicians, and back then we mentioned how Separate Lives was only half of what emerged from those sessions. Far from being b-sides or off-cuts, the other songs formed their own LP, a sister record titled In Monochrome that in many ways builds upon and surpasses its sibling.

It’s worth once again stressing the collaborative nature of Fair Mothers. Through Esther Swift (harp), Sam Mallalieu (drums), Pete Harvey (cello), Faith Eliott and Dana Gavanski (both vocals), and Johnny Lynch and Faith Eliott (both screaming), Allan found ways to lift and expand his music, the supporting collective there not to merely reproduce his ideas but shape and enhance them. Young too played a role at this level, having a direct creative impact and arranging the various elements into their final shape. That the result is so moving, so personal to Allan, is a testament to the organic and intuitive nature of the whole experience.

Because In Monochrome is Keith Allan’s record. His most idiosyncratic, and his best, inspired by his own woes and joys and his particular fascinations. It is of little surprise that isolation is a key theme. The alienating fact that we are separate from one another, never quite able close the gap, and the small moments that reinforce or transcend it. “It was Camus that did for me,” Allan explains:

After I finished [The Stranger] and experiencing insomnia and hallucinations, I reached this total clarity where I knew that I was a separate entity from my body and this immediately blew quite a few fuses in me. I disappeared… and when I came back I knew that everything was connected, was really one thing, but at the same time was nothing and didn’t really exist separate from me. I didn’t know how this could be, or what I was, and above all, how could a boy from Fife possibly have this Zen experience?

This question lies at the heart of the Fair Mothers sound. The intuitive connection of disparate elements, the loneliness and the strange comfort, the kernel of irresolution at its core. In Monochrome feels like the most direct confrontation yet, delving further than ever into the dark and the strange, even if no answers are ever forthcoming. Opener ‘Magic Bullets for Dracula’ duly delivers, dreamily sluggish drums dragging everything forward with an undead lurch, the sad piano always on the verge of fading out into nothing beyond the ambient stillness of an empty room.

This combination of melancholic and eerie is woven into the fabric of the record, as is a grab bag of influences ranging from Neil Young and Stephen Malkmus to the haunted compositions of Prokofiev. Nowhere is this clearer than the sprawling ‘Birds and Bees and Tiny Fleas’. Opening with a wry pessimism that brings to mind Benjamin Shaw, the songs makes its bitterness clear with the repeated refrain of “we are mostly fucked,” before slowly morphing into a languid folk song that’s altogether more wistful. But you have to consider all of the elements to really appreciate what the track achieves. The foreboding guitar lines and peculiar modulated vocals, the near classical crescendos, the field recorded bird song, insect clamour and static-crackled radio transmissions. If the Fair Mothers style is a patchwork, then this is the track which finds it at its most intricate and seamless.

The poltergeistic turmoil of ‘Harpy’ shivers with anger and regret, a demented quiet that plays out behind closed doors. There’s a Lynchian quality to the song, and indeed the record as a whole, as though the melancholy is a curtain behind which older things lurk, benevolent and malevolent both, ominous shapes that sometimes leave an impression through the fabric. ‘Unwinding Road’ is perhaps the most overt reference to these forms, a heartbroken piano ballad concerning the forces that compelled William S. Burroughs to kill his wife, as told in the aftermath. There’s no going back through the curtain, yet the other side is always just there, always moving.

“In Monochrome really signals a search to regain contact with feeling,” Allan says. A lean into the veil, an attempt to bury one’s face in the fabric if only to sense what moves beneath. The title track presents the experience in all of its bittersweet beauty, pressing through the numbing buffers of time and pain and cynicism to one ground zero amongst many. “The lyrics are the most honest of all on the record,” he says, concerning “the fiercest argument I had with my wife, where we had to face the potential ruin of our life together.” What is on the other side might not be good, to feel its presence in no way productive or healthy. But there is something there, and it is still moving.

In Monochrome is out now via Song, By Toad Records and available now from their Bandcamp page.

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By some miracle or black magic, the albums are coming out on Song, By Toad Records, the Edinburgh label that ceased around eighteen months ago after releasing some of our favourite Scottish bands over the last decade. Indeed, it was a support slot with one of those bands, Meursault, that saw Allan meet Song, By Toad’s Matthew Young, the latter offering an afternoon at a recording studio. Somehow, this escalated into an ambitious twenty-plus song project involving a musicians from Scotland and beyond, resulting in Separate Lives and a second LP as well as a series of accompanying singles.

“We got the core of all those songs in just the one afternoon on my acoustic,” Allan explains, “but it was cold that spring and I kept gravitating over to this squeaky old black piano next to the stove, which relaxed me and all these new melodies began to come out […] They kept turning into new songs that we kept on recording whenever and however we could. And it’s grown into this fantastic big project, involving some really wonderful musicians.”

So far two singles from Separate Lives have been released. A duet with fellow Fox Food alumni Dana Gavanski, ‘Rainfall, Canada’ is a slice of swelling melancholia that balances stark beauty with a kind of world weary self-deprecation. The tone is therefore plaintive yet not quite tortured, some small wick of amusement burning, no matter how black the humour. Think somewhere between Malcolm Middleton and Jason Molina‘s acoustic stuff—beat down yet still breathing, unsure whether to cry or to grin should help arrive, or the worst happen.

This time featuring Faith Eliott, ‘Undone’ is cut from the same cloth, though something in the sound is brighter and a little more hopeful. Like the wistfulness of early mornings, when one’s problems have not deserted them but at least sit still enough to seem manageable. Where sadness can come to have its own curious comfort if only for a little while.

Separate Lives is out via Song, By Toad Records on the 14th February and you can pre-order it now.

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I Will Kill Again is final confirmation (if any were needed) that Meursault are back. Things have gotten increasingly polished and less ramshackle since 2008’s Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues, but this is undoubtedly the same band we fell in love with almost ten years ago. This is an album full of ghosts, both literal and metaphoric, from the disembodied voices that sometimes interrupt the broadcast, to Pennycook’s characters themselves, all coalescing to create a grand sense of melancholy.

‘Ellis Be Damned’ is a wonderfully simple example of what Meursault are all about, Pennycook’s vocals front and centre, delivering lyrics that are at once sincere and sardonic. When Pennycook sings, “Nobody knows how this ends / but it ends badly”, it could be read in an entirely existential way, especially when considering the ghost on the cover art, something akin to that creeping, self-effacing dread of our own demise that DeLillo explores in White Noise.

‘The Mill’ may be familiar to some, as it first appeared (in a different form) on Farewell, Bastard Mountain by, uh, Bastard Mountain, a supergroup that contained members of Meursault as well as those of Sparrow & the Workshop, Broken Records and Rob St. John. ‘Ode to Gremlin’, another track that feels like the distilled essence of Meursault, is shot through with a sense of melancholy, but also with a self-referential sense of deprecation, as Pennycook laments the over-use of sea metaphors in art by presenting one of his own (“The last thing the world needs now / is another song about the fucking sea”). It’s not hard to extend this feeling to how much of the liberal western world is feeling right now, the futility of half-hearted good intentions, the doomed sense of helplessness and hypocrisy.

‘Klopfgeist’ builds from strange garbled vocal samples, a metronome that sets the song on its tracks before and elegant piano line and soaring vocals. The song’s title is not some new high-pressing tactic out of Merseyside but the German word for poltergeist, another nod to the spirits that haunt the album. But in true Meursault fashion, things aren’t entirely sincere and po-faced, as the clever opening lines attest.

“Like Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra
to the underworld you are tied”

‘Oh Sarah’ is a very short runaway piano song, before the minimal and emotional indie rock of ‘Belle Amie’, the band playing in a collective whisper, the gentle growl of electric guitar snaking around negative space and Pennycook’s vocals which lament the absence of a loved one (“and it’s true that I still miss you / and it’s true that I’m still angry”). The track bursts into life in the last minute, a noisy crescendo of overspilled emotions, before the crackling ‘Gone, etc…’, a meditation on the hauntings of loved ones after they die (“Gone, you are gone / but that is not all you are”).

The title track is as intense as the title suggests, wired with a whining drone, a smattering of drums and the cried repeated refrain of “I will kill again”. It’s here that Pennycook really focuses on framing himself (as the songwriter) as the antagonist, what he describes to Drowned in Sound as, “ my attempt to redress the balance by confessing all of the terrible things that I’m likely to do but haven’t got around to yet. We’re all capable of terrible things, the trick is to avoid repetition.”

The final track, ‘A Walk in the Park’ is comparably calm and reflected, based on sombre piano and that cold-wind rawness of a lonely cello and vocals that are imbued with a very real sense of loss. Apparently inspired by a day spent hunting for a bench dedicated to Jim Henson in Central Park, it sees the narrator sitting on a bench, looking out at the view and reflecting on things done and gone. But despite this sense of sadness, it is perhaps the most hopeful song on the record, which admittedly isn’t saying much, but its final lines see a sense of advancement, a suggestion that the ghosts might finally be confined to the past, where they belong.

“And I am reminded
that this is a good life
and to enjoy it”

I Will Kill Again is more than just one if 2017’s standout albums, it’s a reminder of just how much we have missed Meursault, and what a treat it is to see them rise from the grave. It’s a worthy addition to their catalogue and shows that not even ten years in the music industry has taken away the plaintive and earnest emotion that has always been at the root of their work.

I Will Kill Again is out now on Song, By Toad Records and you can buy it via Bandcamp.

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So lo and behold Meursault is/are back with a brand new EP, Simple is Good, something we’re very happy about. The EP sounds like an act finding its feet once more, taking in many of the iterations of Meursault from their back catalogue to include downbeat lo-fi numbers, manic indie rock songs and straight up acoustic ballads. The opening title track is based on a repetitively emotive piano line and thudding percussion, eventually joined by swirling strings and Pennycook’s distinctive vocal delivery.

“Once there was nothing
and then let there be light
and then there was still nothing
but now we could see it”

In comparison, ‘By Gaslight’ is a joyous mess. Gone is the composed piano, the careful sense of melancholy. Here we get the devotional drone of church organ and slapped Dessner-esque percussion, all sewn together by the wheeze of harmonica. By the end the vocals ring from the rafters in the jubilant cry of “they are playing our song”.

‘A Killer Chorus’ then strips things right back, Pennycook’s vocals seemingly delivered directly into the listener’s ear, before ‘The Fix Is In’ blows away the cobwebs with a crunchy guitar song that has an almost bluesy swagger. ‘A Kind Of Cure’ slows things right down once more, the slow tap of percussion and ghostly floating synths allowing Pennycook to take centre stage with his greatly affecting vocals, before the gentle acoustic closer, ‘Albeit Barely’. The song is a 90 second shot of what Meursault are all about, beauty and misanthropy interlocked in a configuration that somehow makes things seem like they might just turn out okay after all.

“My God, my God
what an ugly child
what a time to be a live
albeit barely”

You can get Simple is Good from the Song, By Toad Records Bandcamp page. In a further dose of good news, Pennycook has announced a brand new full-length to be released at the end of February. You can pre-order that on Bandcamp too and hear the first single below:

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“The rebel inside is just a cipher baby.
I will not rise to you
and you will not lie to me.”

You get the impression that Stafford could quite easily make solid, radio-friendly, painted-by-numbers pop music that would be lapped up by the undiscerning masses, but instead endeavours to make innovative, progressive music. Aspiring musicians take note!

Taser Revelations will be released by Song, by Toad Records in October. You can buy Stafford’s previous album here.

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