One of my favourite records from last year was the self-titled album by Meredith. This is a bio I wrote for them. Listen to the album here.
Meredith
Meredith is a band bound by distance. Seventeen, their debut and farewell record is an after-the-fact coming of age album recorded in 2021 when the band (Carolina McPhail – vox, guitar, Leon Gateley – guitar, Jake Haslam – drums), bound to their hometown of Jersey (Channel Islands, UK) during Covid, joined forces with producer Lucas Saunter to create a one-off record which ties frayed strings of love, loss and nostalgia into loose knots over the course of 8 sprawling tracks. Now three years later the record is released on Candlepin records, and with the imposed proximity of that era now dissolved, the band find themselves more distant than ever, spread across three countries and two continents.
Distance, lack thereof or otherwise, is apparent in Meredith’s music; songs are sparse yet all-encompassing, where moments of sonic and melodic euphoria creep up on you, tiptoeing before tapping you on the shoulder and enveloping you quicker than you can realise. On opener Meredith, an intense, meditative jam, the band plays the part of rocket ship slowly whirring into life, sounding like My Bloody Valentine by way of Papa M whilst McPhail (Allison’s Gate, A House In The Trees, Viewfinder) reflects on a past relationship and a very specific aspect of gender dynamics, “where women end up feeling remorse for their own pain”; “I’m sorry for being sorry for something that you did”.
Throughout Seventeen, McPhail’s vocals sit deep in the mix, inviting you to lean in and listen close. She possesses an ability to cut to the core of a feeling in as few words as possible. On Below Zero, “They say it’s almost over, but I heard it never ends“ wraps up a five line meditation on life, and the meanings within. Likewise on Motherfucker named carlos, written about her first teenage romance, she shows a unique ability to reach back and make a decades-old feeling feel like it’s just been felt for the first time.
These very personal flavours of nostalgia sit comfortably alongside ruminations on wider themes; family, growing up, American empire, as the band stretch the dimensions of their instruments as far as they possibly can. Guitars glitter one moment and pound the next, whilst Haslam’s drums mirror the emotional peaks and troughs in McPhail’s lyrics. Every back-of-the-mind lamentation treated with the softest touch, every emotional breakthrough backed by a back-of-the-room explosion. On Chlorine, a Frank Ocean inspired ode to childhood days in the pool, the band come together in the kind of exultation they’ve been teasing for the past twenty minutes, the record’s greatest earworm. Finally on Tell me, the album’s closing track, a punishing barrage of reverb roar swirls for an eternity before hurricaning itself into a ferocious half-tempo attack; all the while McPhail bemoaning her love/hate relationship with men, “Tell me again what you’d like me to do”.
Meredith is a band brought together by friendship and circumstance, during a period where we were all, depending on your disposition, invited to or forced to ruminate on all manner of things – the past, the present and the future to name but a few – and channel these reflections into something meaningful. Seventeen is a moment in time, a snapshot of an era defined by its soft edges. A collage of feelings and memories, some specific, some vague, some deeply meaningful, some ultimately inconsequential. In an era defined by the intangible, this record thrives on those intangible feelings. Not just in its words, which tell so much in so little, but in its sound, its feel. It feels big and it feels small, it feels like a life lived. It feels meaningful.