Send "Mekons " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. They're an art-and-literature collective that happens to play music too, a small community who used to be punks together, a hydra whose three heads each sing in a different voice. They've also effectively become process artists. The ideas that shape their songs, and the means by which they create them, are the important part; the songs themselves are basically just documentation.That makes latter-day albums like Ancient & Modern very interesting in a contemporary-art context, and occasionally tough-going in a putting-on-recordings-and-listening-to-them context. If you're waiting for them to write another "Where Were You?" or "Memphis, Egypt" or "Now We Have the Bomb", don't hold your breath; it's hard to imagine most of these songs being the kind of thing grouchy old guys at Mekons shows yell for. (Mekons shows are heavily populated by grouchy old guys.) The ostensible concept behind this record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago. It's a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title-- although, of course, with their ties to the art world, Mekons know that titles can carry a lot of weight. Opacity, though, is a persistent problem on Ancient & Modern. A lot of its lyrics might as well have been assembled exquisite-corpse style: "Calling All Demons" wanders from "a reptile thinking its first thoughts" to the head of John the Baptist to "a fan-club meeting down the steps on Briggate" to "ice cream, eggs and bread," and so on. A couple of its lines seem to allude to Oscar Wilde, but that's the only point of coherence to someone who wasn't in the room when it was written....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Emerging from the late-punk/early-post-punk scene of 1970s England, the Mekons have undergone numerous shifts in the course of the their 35-year career. After beginning as a can't-play-their-instruments punk band, they moved on to weird but exciting lo-fi experimentation, broke up, reformed, released the founding text of so-called "alt-country," Fear and Whiskey, and turned out the ultimate anti-rock-n'-roll rock-n'-roll album, The Mekons Rock 'n Roll, by the end of the '80s, and by the turn of the century, the band's creative energies seemed spent. Everything that had made the band so appealing, both musically (their seamless absorption of diverse influences into a singular vision) and extra-musically (their democratic organization, commitment to leftist political expression, and disgusted but never hopeless worldview) seemed to have become exhausted. Writing about the band in 1999, Luc Sante was forced to adopt what he described as a "eulogistic tone," when expressing, in some of the most moving lines of rock criticism ever written, what it was that made the band so important: "[The Mekons] have brought poetry, sexiness, and panache to the theme of getting by and making do, an adult theme if there ever was one and an appropriate development from the anti-glamour self-determination of 1977. Given that the prevailing myth these days concerns the effortless acquisition of insane wealth, with the corollary that anyone without money is dirt, those of us who are dirt and fated to remain that way can appreciate having a pop group to call our own, as a kind of home team." But despite Sante's lament for a band that had seemingly run its course, the Mekons came clawing back, digging deep into gospel and British-Isles folk to give us their masterful 2002 album Ooh! (Out of Our Heads), reimagining their own early catalogue for 2004's Punk Rock, and drawing on an eclectic mix of influences for 2007's Natural. That diversity of inspiration and sureness of purpose is present on Ancient & Modern, the band's first offering in four years. The subtitle, 1911 – 2011, might slightly oversell the album's ambitions, but everything from singer Sally Timms's lounge act on "Geeshi," to the various folk, rock, and country influences that have been the group's bedrock during their 35-year career, to what sounds like a Halloween-style horror-film theme song fall effortlessly into place on the group's latest, which feels by turns modest and teeming with aspiration. This latter quality applies most significantly to the title track, an epic, seven-minute suite which features all three of the band's singers (Tom Greenhalgh, Timms, and Jon Langford) and begins with the abovementioned slasher-flick music and ends with an inspirational, defiant chant in which the group's members are joined by the Burlington Welsh Male Chorus....full text |
| Spin |
| As post-punk progenitors, art-collective outsiders, or alt-country trailblazers, the Mekons always have been ahead of the curve; even 1999's Me anticipated our current era of sleazy Internet hookups. So their decision to harken back to the year 1911 on their 26th album dovetails nicely with the New Americana wave, though these veterans get grittier than any of those new jacks, whether it's the title track's salty sea shanty or the music-hall slink of the Sally Timms-sung "Geeshie." For all the period-piece lethargy of "Warm Summer Sun" and "I Fall Asleep," though, they balance it out with the blistering "Space in Your Face" and "Honey Bear."...full text |
Mekons lyrics
|
| |||||||
