IN our social-mediated times, the prevalent trend in music, like much art and writing, is the everyday confessional.

Done well, of course, turning the emotional complexities and daily minutiae of one’s life into art can often result in moments of beauty.

Many were found on the raw Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues or 2010’s All Creatures Will Make Merry, early albums by Edinburgh outfit Meursault.

Writing about “what you know” has its limits though, says Neil Scott Pennycook, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who founded the folk-influenced band in the mid-2000s.

The more he wrote about himself, the further removed he felt.

“The first two Meursault records were autobiographical affairs,” Pennycook says. “I was trying to write about vague feelings or emotional responses to things that were happening around or to me, and trying to present that in a poetic way with melodies. As I wrote more, I became a bit bored of that and realised that, weirdly, it wasn’t as reflective of myself or my character as what I’m doing now.”

Pennycook tried a new tack for I Will Kill Again, the accomplished 2017 album which went on, like 2013’s Something For The Weakened, to be nominated for the Scottish Album Of The Year Award.

A comeback of sorts after Pennycook had called time on Meursault back in 2014, the elegant, haunted record saw the songwriter centring a more extreme, cartoon-like version of himself.

“Writing from that detached point of view, I could create fictional circumstances for that character and see how they would react to things that weren’t really happening to me,” says Pennycook. “When you write about characters, whether I’ve created them or they’re things from history, I end up writing more about myself, presenting more of my own character, my own spin on it.”

The musician talks of what he sees as an imbalance in art, where fewer people are exploring reality through fiction.

“A lot of our non-lived experience comes from fiction, and we seem to sometimes discount that,” he says. “It’s not just entertainment value, it’s what we draw our morals from. Personally I gleam more from fictional storytelling and how that relates to my life in terms of the parallels I can draw and what I can learn from, as opposed to more opinion-based artworks.”

Bygone stories and the forgotten role of myths are ideas which inform Crow Hill, a new album featuring 11 songs by Pennycook and an interpretation of Audrey Williams’s I Heard My Mother Praying For Me, most famously sung by her husband Hank Williams Snr.

Described as a “collection of urban horror vignettes set to music”, Crow Hill features songs Pennycook originally wrote as short stories. The musical arrangements, he says, were developed in parallel.

Each tells of an inhabitant of Crow Hill, a place “where fiction intrudes upon reality”.

Here, a high school teacher tells a class about the Nakhla Dog – an Egyptian pup supposedly vaporised by a meteorite, and a family watches aghast while a relative transforms into a sea creature.

On the outskirts of Crow Hill, the Beast prowls. Once hair-raising, he’s now forgotten and unfeared.

With his tales no longer read, his roams aimlessly, his powers and purpose having drained away.

“The beast is doomed,” says Pennycook. “Quite unimposing, almost quite pitiful, really. What I’m trying to do is present stories of creatures, often almost mythological creatures, that are forgotten.”

The role of such figures and stories is how they illuminate the darker side of human nature, shadow selves we’re foolish to ignore.

On The Unreliable Narrator, Crow Hill’s electro-splodged final track, the oldest inhabitant of the town laments how she’s watched the town change and now does “not care for it”.

“The bad parts of us, the terrible stories of our history, they are there and need to be addressed,” says Pennycook.

As the press release accompanying the album puts it: “Our monsters are as real as our better angels. We must take great care in how we tend to them.”

Crow Hill takes its name from the lower summit of Arthur’s Seat. From there, looking north to Fife, south to the frontman’s home town of Penicuik and inland towards West Lothian, there are many Crow Hills, places which used to clatter with industry.

In an early talk with Pablo Clark, the comic illustrator responsible for Crow Hill’s artwork, the pair talked of Kinghorn and Burntisland.

“There were references he was quite familiar with, being a Fifer originally,” says Pennycook. “These ex-industry towns fit with a narrative of towns which have these almost forgotten histories, be that industrial history or the more sort of a mythological history that I’m writing about.

“I liked that balance of applying an almost Grimm’s Fairytale technique to that post-industrial landscape.”

Clark’s 12 illustrations will partly inform Crow Hill’s live shows, with more visual, theatrical elements being developed over time. In addition to the album’s launch at Summerhall as part of Southern Exposure festival this weekend, more gigs are expected to be announced in the coming weeks, says Pennycook.

Recorded with Graeme Young at Edinburgh’s Chamber Studios, Crow Hill is the first release on the acclaimed engineer’s Common Grounds Records.

All Meursault’s previous physical releases were put out via Song, By Toad, the fondly-held label which closed its doors last year.

It had been Pennycook’s Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues which had given music writer Matthew Young the impetus to start the label as an outgrowth from his blog back in 2008.

“I was sad to see Matthew call it a day but I very much doubt that we have seen the last of him,” says Pennycook. “Give him a couple of tunes on a sunny afternoon and hopefully he’ll get the bit between the teeth again.”

Crow Hill, then, marks a new era for Meursault. As well as the new label and Pennycook’s different approach to writing, he says he’s finally comfortable with Meursault as his solo project, aided by a revolving cast of musicians and collaborators.

Crow Hill is also the first Meursault record to sound properly full and rounded. Underneath the guitars, Robyn Dawson’s violin, Reuben Taylor’s keys, and the glitches and whirrs of Pennycook’s weathered sampler (“the longest-serving member of Meursault”), run actual bass lines – a first for Meursault.

“I don’t know if I have some blind spot in my musical education regarding bass frequency,” Pennycook laughs.

“I’ve gone back to Meursault records from the past for comparison and I’m like: ‘Oh yeah. Holy sh*t. No bass. OK’,” says Pennycook. “Now it sounds a lot fuller, very much like us in the room. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a record that sounded like this and I’m very proud of it. To my ears, this one sounds like a totally different thing altogether.”

Crow Hill is released on June 21 via Common Grounds

Southern Exposure: June 21 and 22, Summerhall, Edinburgh, June 21 6pm to 1am £17, June 22 2pm to 10pm, £18, £25 weekend.

Tel: 0131 560 1580.

www.summerhall.co.uk

www.summerhall.co.uk