Meursault – ‘Rats In The Corn’ from ‘Meursault’
When you see an artist named after the main character in Camus’ existential classic ‘L’Etranger’ then you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to get. Since 2008’s ‘Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues’ set, Neil Pennycook and his band have never failed to live up/down to the name, delivering a clutch of records that are each shot through with the marvellous bleakness that one would expect. This year’s eponymous set is no exception. It glowers with a face like thunder, stands swaying in the maelstrom, laughing wickedly at the downpour. Breaks in the cloud are rare, and when they come seem only to shed the palest light in which everything looks blasted and forlorn. Even the wry humour in a title like ‘Making The Most Of The Raw Materials Of Futility’ is tentative, like the curved lip of the damaged soul whose eye you really don’t want to catch. “You are just sick” intones Pennycook, and you are never quite certain if he means you, the world, or the face he sees in the mirror. Possibly all three.
The entire album is a half hour season in hell, each song an immersive experience in a theme park dedicated to fear, loss, sorrow, (self)loathing and the awkward raw love of the outsider. It’s bookended by two extremes, two characters that meet and discover they have the same preoccupations buried beneath their oppositional appearances. Album closer ‘Teacher, Was I Wrong To Burn’ is the heartbreaker of the year, no question. The one song that can make me break down and cry. In this it puts me in mind of Red House Painters’ gorgeous, brittle ‘Michael’, both Pennycook and Kozelek mourning figures from their youth and in so doing mourning the loss of not only that youth but the stretching of time that some souls have been denied. There is a sense that in acknowledging the possibility of absence, Pennycook concludes that the bleakness of existence might just be worth its weight of pain for the fleeting pleasures of the sparkling moment. But then again, maybe not.
As suggested, album opener ‘Rats In The Corn’ is from the other end of the spectrum. The song first appeared in recorded form back in 2020 on Pennycook’s solo ‘Vol 1’ EP. Accompanied by just acoustic guitar and harmonica (and a few overdubbed vocal harmony echoes), it is a raw folk song, a Dylan-esque lament from before he freaked out the beard-stroking worthies in Newport. As a ‘full band’ recording on ‘Meursault’, however, the song is full Dylan Goes Electric, transformed into a monstrous beast that prowls and rages. Underpinned by the hum of ungrounded electrics, it feels like we are in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a de-saturated landscape where withered hands grasp rusted wire and a hunter’s moon casts shadows of lead. It’s the sound of claustrophobia, the reek of rotten vegetation and, you suspect, something more sinister. This may be a kind of environmentalist lament, a hymn to the climate crisis, if you will, but it is, appropriately enough, an existential one. It feels like a howl of anger at the inhumanity inherit in humans, a sorrowful reflection on the impotence of individuality. We’re all fucked.
More than this though, it feels like humanity’s grief echoed back on itself, the immensity of love pulling itself to pieces from within. A breathless, deathless implosion.