Meursault - Tears at the ceilidh

Meursault make haunting electronica, with ukuleles. It's great stuff, says ANDREW EATON

TWO GIGS IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS have bowled me over. One was by a folky quartet who made a thrilling, life-affirming racket with ukuleles, banjos and a wooden crate, and reminded me of Neil Young and REM. The other one was by a man who conjured haunting, distorted electronica using little more than a laptop, his voice and a loop pedal, and reminded me of Thom Yorke of Radiohead's solo experiments.

The odd thing was, they were the same band. Meursault, a loose collective of musicians headed by Edinburgh singer-songwriter Neil Pennycook, are one of the most enticing, yet hard to pin down, groups to emerge from the capital in some time. At the first gig, they'd been asked to do the show at the last minute and didn't have time to reprogramme their computers, so staged an impromptu "unplugged" set. At the second, Pennycook was the only member of the band who could actually make it. It's an impressibly flexible approach, even if it's potentially baffling for audiences. "It's a kind of revolving door," nods Pennycook. "I always liked those kinds of bands."

What holds the two extremes of Meursault together is Pennycook's beautiful songs and instantly recognisable voice, an impassioned, heartwrenching howl that can invest even the most straightforward of phrases with a sense of urgency. Potentially he is Edinburgh's answer to Mark Eitzel of American Music Club – who he resembles a little, being a tall, gangly, bald-headed romantic with a black, ironic sense of humour – or if he chooses to make pop records, Robert Smith of The Cure. One album into their career, Meursault sound like they could go in all sorts of exciting directions.

Currently, it's enough that they stand out a mile from the identikit indie guitar bands that inhabit Scotland's stages much of the time. Who else is making melancholy electronica with banjos and ukuleles? It's a struggle even to know what to call this odd, inspiring little subgenre – ukulectronica?

"Every bit of press we get picks up on that," sighs Pennycook, not a man to take a compliment without a self-deprecating grumble. "I just choose instruments that sound nice to me. I got really bored of guitar bands, or of playing guitar. It's that classic thing of not trying to use traditional instruments and stretch it a bit. The ukulele is a beautiful instrument, a lot more versatile than people give them credit for."

Actually, what mostly makes Meursault stand out from the crowd is the quality of Pennycook's songs, which are simultaneously romantic, intensely bleak and wryly funny. Meursault's debut album, self-financed "by crappy jobs and donations from friends", is called Pissing on Bonfires, Kissing with Tongues. "Maybe in a drunken haze I figured it was a good way to title an album of break-up songs," Pennycook explains. "It just seemed like two ends of a spectrum, really. Kissing with tongues is the height of love and lust, and then pissing on bonfires is one of those two people spoiling it for everyone. That's generally how it works." He laughs. "It's not deliberately trying to be funny because I'm not that funny a guy, as anyone who knows me will testify."

If this makes Pennycook sound rather glum and earnest – along with the fact that he took his band's name from Albert Camus's The Outsider – it's worth mentioning that he laughs easily, and seems to have plenty of friends. Rather than actively seek out a record deal, Meursault have spent the past couple of years gathering kindred spirits around them to form Bear Scotland, a collective, of sorts, of Edinburgh bands who play at each other's gigs and plug each other's wares at every opportunity.

"We realised that we enjoyed our friends' music as much as anything we would buy or go and see live," says Pennycook. "If something's good you want to be associated with it, so it seemed like a no-brainer to me. If everyone's under this sort of banner every band's success feeds off each other. The Fence Collective (the Fife record label, headed by Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote) are kind of the template for any collective idea. I always catch myself saying 'label'... I don't want it to be seen as a label because it's really not." Perhaps he'd prefer 'commune', I jokingly suggest. "We're working on that," he replies, not missing a beat. "We're going to buy some property in the Pentlands."

• Meursault's next show is at the Meridian, Edinburgh, on 14 June. For more info, visit the website myspace.com/meursaulta701

What other people are saying...

"At a time when Broken Records and Frightened Rabbit besiege Blighty with their doe-eyed tunesmithery, it's easy to overlook the remnants of Scotland's burgeoning musical landscape. Edinburgh-spawned ensemble Meursault may be just one edifice in that Saltire-draped cul-de-sac of sound but what a well-chiselled pillar of sonic goodness they are. Clasping together starry-eyed electronica with cotton-picking wreaths of banjo plucks and ukulele strums, their debut album is an unassuming triumph of glum-pussed Scottish charm that cradles its knees like a sombrely lit fusion of Postal Service and King Creosote."

– Drowned in Sound

"The music may be open to accusations of miserablism but it's not morose, and that rhythm just drives it on through everything as if, even in heartbreak, it had somewhere very urgent to go."

– www.songbytoad.com