Meursault "Crank Resolutions"

In recent years, Scotland has produced bands the likes of Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad, bands who are masters of expressing those darker, lonesome feelings. Meursault shares a great deal with those two previous groups, not just a Scottish heritage, but also their tragic, melancholy temperament. Inevitably, Meursault will be associated with the more established groups of their countrymen. A key track off their recent album All Creatures Will Make Merry, "Crank Resolutions" finds singer Neil Pennycook amidst the repetitive pattering of drums and layered keyboards, forlornly bemoaning his separation from some uncertain group of friends or social circle. The opening verse is beyond powerful, beyond downcast: "I broke down on new year's day / I mixed my drinks, and I lost my way." The feedback and distortion builds, and drives the narrator's own disoriented sense of emptiness.

It is never truly expressed who or what the narrator has become distanced from. The lyrics are cryptic, leaving the track open to interpretation. Yet given the title and the setting of the track on New Year's Day, it could be supposed that the narrator has resolved to kick his drug habit, crank being another term for methamphetamines, and separate himself from his circle of close friends who he used to run with. "Crank Resolutions" looks back with a gloomy remorse and incredible solitude ("I walked past the houses of every friend I've ever known / and I set off on my own"), and the track's most remorseful sentiment is illuminated by the repetitive lines "They carried you away" and "When they carried me away." The narrator seems confident that despite his current condition, in his lonesomeness he comes close to acknowledging that it might very well be beyond his capacity to help himself, he will one day be far removed from this misery. What appears to be most difficult is his realization that he lost an opportunity to escape this place or scene with someone very close to him, someone who has now moved on. In this self-imposed isolation, conscious regret permeates the track, and the narrator's regret and contrasting denial of those feelings the are bluntly summed up in the couplets: "If I had only known / that you'd been waiting in the street for me all day" and "And I never saw you waving / At least that's what I'll say." Meursault steeps this track with the feeling of such weighted regret and brooding, such a bleak outlook places an emphasis on the inability to find solace in moving forward towards something new. A cornerstone song for an album that Pennycook states places a focus on the lengths to which people go to pursue happiness and how that pursuit affects their state of mind. There must be something brewing up there in Scotland that makes a man sing with such despondency, but perhaps it is because the dreary days always seem more vivid in one's mind. As Sam Quinn says: "If you go up and cut somebody's stomach with a knife, they're probably going to remember that longer than if you give them a piece of gum," I think Meursault would agree.