Thirty years is a long time to be involved with any profession, much less the notoriously soul-draining music business. But the ability of the Mekons to continue doing it without becoming jaded or redundant lies in their embrace of variety and their slippery punk/rock/country/whatever approach. For this, their 26th record, main Mekons Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh have concocted a mostly acoustic, folksy contemplation of modern life that nevertheless sounds ancient. The songs are like sea chanteys, messy and simple but haunted, as if the melodies had their origins in some long-dead Druid society. But the lyrics are something else, referencing everything from terrorism ("Burning in the Desert, Burning") and the computer age ("Ones and Zeroes"), to the perils of aging (the wonderful "Dickie Chalkie and Nobby"). Elsewhere, "White Stone Door" uses percussive instrumentation to liven up Sally Timms's dark, wistful vibrato, while "Cockermouth" features the uneasy line "you have to believe this is the end." It's pretty dour stuff on the whole, but delivered with playfully melodic wit and a certain poetic resignation usually found only in the hearts of forgotten souls and madmen (and maybe Tom Waits). We ignore such sad wisdom at our peril. --Matthew Cooke
Review by Mark Deming
The Mekons are celebrating their 30th anniversary in 2007 as they release their 26th album, Natural, which to the uninitiated might sound as if the band were bowing to the ravages of time with its relaxed tempos, emphasis on acoustic instruments, and general reluctance to rock out in the traditional manner. However, this overlooks the fact that the Mekons have never had much truck with how things are "traditionally" done; the Mekons have rarely sounded as if they were following the same musical path on two consecutive albums, and while the aggressive stance of 2002's OOOH! (Out of Our Heads) and 2004's Punk Rock has taken a back seat to a more measured and subtle approach, Natural certainly fits in with the group's great tradition of intelligent ranting. Most of Natural suggests the Mekons sitting around the campfire, perhaps after some failed revolutionary action has knocked out the power, singing songs that at once reflect their cynicism and offer some faint hope for a world where either justice or cheap beer is in ready supply. "You don't have to believe in the end," from "Cockermouth," is the benchmark of the album's semi-optimism; "Dark Dark Dark," "Dickie Chalkie and Nobby," and "Give Me Wine or Money" all offer sketches of resistance in a world that isn't much interested in their campaign; and the closer, "Perfect Mirror," calmly contemplates the final defeat. In the midst of all this, the Mekons do find space for one noisy rocker, the digital-age rant "Zeroes and Ones," while an undertow of electric noise adds to the menace of "Dark Dark Dark," suggesting once again that the Mekons don't put much stock in even their own self-imposed rules. Natural is a quiet but disconcerting snapshot of a world of chaos, which is to say it depicts a world not so different than the one that saw the birth of the Mekons in 1977, and confirms their message has remained constant even when their musical approach has not.
Mekons
Natural
[Quarterstick; 2007]
Rating: 7.9
A couple of years ago, Wired magazine tapped Jeff Tweedy to curate a night of their "Next Fest", the idea being that the Wilco frontman would select some innovative act as the future of music. Ever the pragmatist, Tweedy picked Joanna Newsom, not for aesthetic reasons but practical ones: in the future, he surmised, we'll all be living in a post-apocalyptic world without electricity, so he wisely selected a singer who can go without.
From the start, the Mekons have been making post-apocalyptic music, albeit of the wry and electric sort. But Natural, the latest in the group's long line of records, is, per Tweedy's dictum, truly post-apocalyptic folk, music for when the lights go out and hope burns only dimly. It's the Mekons unlikely "unplugged" bid.
Of course, like most unplugged sets, it's really nothing of the sort, and as folk it won't exactly have the purist set nodding in approval. In fact, Natural, is only folk in the sense that the Mekons were ever truly punk, at least in the standard parlance. Indeed, the semi-legendary Leeds group is about as punk as any act that would cheekily title a record Punk Rock. Which is to say, for most of their 30 years, the group has been just as closely associated with the communal aspects of folk as they have been with any other style of music, punk included. The Mekons shifted idioms to fit their shifting tastes, but they never abandoning the earnest ideals and outrage that fueled the band through decades of Margaret Thatcher, miner strikes and major label snafus.
So, folk, reggae, punk, whatever: Natural is first and foremost Mekons disc, of a thematic piece with 2000's mournful Journey to the End of the Night, and as such it's important to take note of what the band is saying as much as how they're saying it. "The twisted trees sing," go the opening lines of "Dark, Dark Dark". "The trees stare back/ And we burn in smoke/ Reflecting in the water like ghosts/ Drifting this way and that." This is Thoreau's nightmare, transcendentalism flipped on its side, the forces of nature recoiling at the sight of man's folly and fighting back, then sifting through the wreckage of civilization.
Or so we might surmise. Thoreau gets a shout out in "Cockermouth", and the rest of the album is filled with imagery both environmental and elemental, with an emphasis on blood and fire. "Cockermouth" introduces the not very bucolic observation of "jet fighters swooping loud and low" but the song may be a wasteland flashback driven by an echoing mantra of defeat: "You'd don't have to believe in the end/ You have to believe this is the end."
A few months back, speaking in his Chicago studio, Langford declared his love of classic UK folk, and revealed how much of Natural was written and composed in a room of a hired house. That might explain why so much of the album sounds like what might come of a band of survivors convening after the end of the world, setting their stories to music to be passed on to future generations. The instrumentation is largely spare, the lyrics showcasing little of the rage or sardonic humor for which the band is known. Rather, this is pretty relentlessly bleak stuff, and even the pagan poetry of "White Stone Door" is played straight: "Dance the toes right off your feet/ Making up the story as you go," sings Sally Timms. "The dancers are all dead we know/ Behind the white stone door."
The shuffling "Give Us Wine or Money" features an agrarian scenario played not as Communist utopia but as cutthroat reality where "on the earth where blood is spilt/ The few must feed the many." The incredible "Diamonds", with its trademark collective vocals, likens the potential to do right in the world to unpolished gems, but success is still tempered by death, with salmon lost at sea miraculously finding their way back to fresh water and "the inevitable slaughter." Even the more rollicking country blues of "Shocking Curse Bird" features the central metaphor nesting "in Goya's nightmare."
On 2002's rousing OOOH! the Mekons were pissed and fighting back. Here the battle is already lost, the band resigned and, all options exercised, waiting for what comes next. The power's out. The lights are off. Natural is the end of the world as cautionary campfire tale, the Mekons akin to T.S. Eliot's dejected hollow men (whose world ended "not with a bang but with a whimper"), waiting for the sun to rise and wishing the new day will reveal the path forward.
-Joshua Klein, August 24, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/mekons
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