The Mekons
The Mekons Rock'n'Roll
(reissue
2001, Collector's Choice)
The album title is cliched but earned: Rock `n' Roll
is a defiant album that finds no comfort, swagger filled with doubt, a glorious trip through
very dark days. Now re-released 12 years after it first appeared, all of it still sounds fresh,
immediate, aggressive. Starting with the supercharged "Memphis Egypt" in which the
Mekons celebrate the music they love to hate ("I walk through a wall/No pain at all/Born
inside the belly of rock `n' roll"), the album surges through songs about prostitution,
aging, living alone, cocaine addiction, rock's bleak history, insanity, and odes to darkness.
There are no speed bumps or blind spots along the way. By definition there are two bonus tracks
on this re-release, except that these songs were included on the original U.K. release, so
consider their previous absence in the U.S. as wrongs that have now been righted. (The rousing
rocker "Heaven and Back" is particularly welcome, one of the Mekons' finest songs.)
Where to begin the celebration? The whole album is a triumph, for so many reasons:
It's the unschooled vocals of three comrades - Jon Langford's angry and aging young man's
declaration of independence howl, Sally Timms's pure and prickly croon, Tom Greenhalgh's yells
of exultation and/or resignation; it's the acoustic guitar accompanied by a pounding drum beaten
twice to the measure during the instrumental passage at the end of "Club Mekon," a
lament sped up to a jig; it's the vibrating guitar strums in "Learning to Live On Your O
wn," in which the guitar solos are rudimentary and evocative, and Timms sings about
throwing a "rock `n' roll song on the fire"; it's the way Steve Goulding gives the
drums a good thrashing, tapping a cymbal or nothing at all to build the tension until he kicks
the bass drum in to bring back the band as he does on "Heaven and Back," or his
relentless ferocity from start to finish on "Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet"; it's Suzie
Honeyman often playing a tuneless fiddle as befits a noisy dance, for dance music this is, even
if by dancing this means jumping around without design because it's more fun than walking into
walls, and probably more enlightening, too.
This is a fiercely passionate album. This
is rock `n' roll as it was meant to be played. This is 1989. That's Elvis on the cover. Rating: 9
The Curse of the
Mekons/F.U.N. '90
(Collector's Choice)
"Magic, fear and superstition/This is the
Curse of the Mekons." So proclaims Tom Greenhalgh in the opening stanza of this star-crossed
band's first album of 90s – and he wasn't far off. Soon after completing the tapes to what
they expected would be their third full-length major-label outing, their American distributor,
A&M , rejected the recording, reportedly calling it “technically and commercially
unsatisfactory.” Ironically, the aptly named The Curse of the Mekons would go
unreleased for a decade in the country that the majority of the British-born band would soon
call home.
Hearing Curse now, finally making its appearance stateside, what’s surprising is how current and how just plain good the record sounds. What’s not surprising is that it’s rife with what liner-note author Robert Christgau calls “angst that’s resigned, or maybe just depressed” – a kind of seeping blue fog that permeates even the recording’s most aggressive tracks. But unlike their up-tempo masterpiece Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll, released two years earlier, Curse is in many ways more indicative of the band’s M.O., complete with a drug-history lesson (“Brutal”), a fake-socialism rant (“Funeral”) and the rousing, self-referential battle cry that leads the CD (“Curse”). In between, there’s plenty more to love, including Sally Timms’ lovely reading of Jon Anderson’s “Wild and Blue” and a closer, “100% Song,” wherein Jon Langford digs up Jesus, asks his forgiveness and then gives thanks for the band’s beers and their careers (although I’m sure he’d switch the order in retrospect).
The band has soldiered on, despite its members increasing geographic separation, but only on the recent Journey to the End of the Night have they approached the magic, fear and superstition they conjured here. But don’t count them out. Whatever the curse of the Mekons is, it doesn’t seem to include artistic stasis.
Rating: 8
Journey to the End of the Night
(1/4 Stick)
There is a cynical French novel called Journey to the End of the Night by
Celine, the likely inspiration for the song on the Doors first album called "End of the
Night". Celine finds no hope in the human race, while the Doors sing about dread as
outsiders looking in, Jim Morrison as a narrator of a gothic movie. "Journey to the
End of the Night" is now also an excellent album by the Mekons. They have been in the
business for over 20 years now and have a right to be both cynical and bored. They are
neither.
The Mekons have no interest in being narrators or bystanders. Instead of merely telling the
tale of a crumbling city, they take part in the movie. The songs are about life during wartime
(the Mekons have been here before), literally in the case of "Last Weeks of the War"
though every song seems to be set in a city under siege. The band plays with a commitment worthy
of teenagers who have just discovered rock and roll. Listen to the singer
in "Neglect" pleading to his mirror for money, pleading as if he can
really get it, desperate because he's hiding his failure from someone far away,
singing "please" with such longing it sounds like he might actually get
the money somehow, even if he has to steal it. Listen to Sally Timms, who might have
rock's most bittersweet vocal, burying London in one song, in another drinking in a bar
while the flood arrives. Listen to "Powers & Horror" where it's last call,
and the band gathers around a piano to sing "The more you stray, the more you're
saved." A time to die, a time to drink.
This is a soft record that speaks loudly, lots of acoustic guitar and fiddle, original folk
songs about fighting despair over and over again. Then the Mekons close the album
with "Last Night on Earth," in which they turn defeat into victory by dancing on
their own graves.
Rating: 8
See also the Waco Brothers.
Artists l
Essays
l The List
l Sites & Sounds New Issue
l Best Of l
Fave Links l
About Us
