Post Description

The first thing that strikes you is the voice. At once coarse and warm, like the creak of the stairs of your childhood home as it settles in at night, Meursault’s Neil Pennycook sounds like a man with more than a few stories to tell. Of course it helps that, instrumentation-wise, Something for the Weakened is one of those musical "progressions" which sees the band abandon the programmed beats that punctuated earlier recordings in favour of a more conventional sound that knows when to play it sparse and when to swell, filling out beautiful melodies that top the five-minute mark in places. But such is Pennycook’s voice, one suspects it would be distinguishable regardless of what it was playing against.

So let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, this third album from the Edinburgh band gets the full-blown studio treatment where previous releases have been home-recorded efforts, and the difference in sound is palpable. And yet while it’s hard to avoid comparisons to better-known contemporaries Frightened Rabbit or the Twilight Sad on some of its more bombastic tracks, every time you try to pigeonhole Weakened as another perfectly pleasant anthemic-indiefolk-by-the-numbers effort a stripped-back piano interlude the likes of “Lightning Bolt” will stop you in your tracks.



Verenigd Koninkrijk
Folk/Rock
Label: Song, By Toad Records 


1.Thumb
2.Flittin’
3.Lament for a Teenage Millionaire
4.Settling
5.Hole
6.Lightning Bolt
7.Dull Spark
8.Dearly Distracted
9.Mamie
10.Untitled