49. OOOH! (Out of Our Heads)

49. OOOH! (Out of Our Heads), Mekons (Quarterstick, 2002)

Formed as a punk trio at the University of Leeds in ’77 before a reinvention in the mid-’80s as a more nuanced, expanded unit exploring British folk and American country music through a lens of sardonic and literary commentary, the Mekons have recorded regularly since their inception, with only the Fall matching their continuity and longevity.  Much like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, the Mekons have demonstrated an acute if sometimes ambiguous socio-political consciousness; for the Mekons, this often operates out of time.  Anyone expecting their fifteenth LP, OOOH!, to be a direct analysis of the new post-9/11 world, then, may be confused to instead find a set of songs that opaquely invoke ritual, myth, and dissent from present-day England to the pagan sects of the pre-Saxon wilds.  OOOH! began as an art show of the same name—the bulk of Mekons are also visual artists—revolving around, well, heads. History and mythology contain a slew of famous heads: the decapitated ones of Anne Boleyn, John the Baptist, and Jayne Mansfield; the allegedly frozen one of Walt Disney; the beguilingly poisonous one of Medusa; and a garden variety of various types of heads—shrunken, floating, missing; decorative heads placed on buildings as sentinels or superstition; the mo’ai stone heads of Easter Island. The songs of OOOH! use these stories as inspiration.

Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem opens the album with a ghostly intonation of its title’s acronym that sounds like a wolf’s howl.  Clattering percussion strikes up and Jon Langford directs a call-and-response group vocal.  “The sword is sharp/the arrow swift/the witnesses all seeing,” he sings, the rough-hewn arrangement suggesting a band of battle-worn troubadours heading for their final confrontation.  The possibility of death is clear, of it resulting in “two brass farthings on my eyelids,” as sung in This Way Through the Fire, but as members of the Commonwealth-era radical groups listed in Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem would tell you, such is the risk of fighting for one’s cause.  Much of the album addresses the solitude and introspection possible in the midst of such communal activity.  In Bob Hope & Charity, the ragged-band sing-along continues although the story is of a flagging comrade hoping for telepathic connections with his mates.  Tom Greenhalgh sings a version of traditional folk song Lone Pilgrim, about a private epiphany about redemption of the righteous.  Susie Honeyman’s sad violin accompanies Sally Timms as she admits on the album’s quietest track, Hate Is the New Love, “how we still love the war” and “When we say we’ve had enough/We know we really want more.”  Winter, with a largely acoustic but boisterous and ramshackle arrangement featuring harmonica, fiddle, Turkish saz, and prominent tambourine, shows optimism for calmer times after a pagan winter spent naked and drunk “in the belly of the beast.”  The first verse of the Greenhalgh-led Only You and Your Ghost Will Know addresses a lonely traveler whose friends have died; in the second verse, he himself has frozen to death on the road.  The album’s downbeat denouement, Stonehead, closes the proceedings with a reminder that one day, like the frozen traveler, “our memory will vanish from the memory of the world.”  Its concepts may be less immediate than those of other Aughts-model Mekons albums (see #83 and #104), but the rewards of OOOH! are lasting and it is the always engaging group’s strongest album of the decade.

Highlights: Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Only You and Your Ghost Will Know, Winter, Bob Hope & Charity

Sublime bit: When the title chorus of Ghost kicks in after the group vocal of “First the chill and then the stupor/Then the letting go.”

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56. Gold Brick

56. Gold Brick, Jon Langford (ROIR, 2006)

Chicago-dwelling Welsh expatriate Jon Langford is one of rock’s most prolific artists.  While perhaps best known as a member of the Mekons from the Leeds punk class of ’77, Langford has made nearly three dozen albums with his other groups the Three Johns (’82-’90), traditional country collective the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and cowpunk sextet Waco Brothers, as well as a multitude of collaborations with other songwriters.  Along with his tireless musical schedule, Langford is an accomplished visual artist; his paintings often depict other musicians, particularly the country and western acts who have inspired his own music since the Mekons shifted away from punk in the late ’70s.  Not until ’95 did Langford get around to issuing an LP under his own name; Misery Loves Company—credited to “Jonboy” Langford, along with the Cosmonauts—is a ramshackle but loving set of Johnny Cash covers (like his painting, Langford’s music often celebrates country artists).  With ’98’s Skull Orchard, a pop-tinged set of songs in honor of his Welsh homeland, Langford delivered his first true “solo” album, not hinging on collaboration or homage.  He would issue three more in the Aughts; works like Mayors of the Moon (’02, backed by Canadian alt-country group the Sadies) and All the Fame of Lofty Deeds (’04) are serviceable roots-rock albums melding cuttingly literate writing, amiable humor, and a keen insight to America’s cultural landscape. Langford’s next solo work, though, would take a confident and ambitious stride forward.

For Gold Brick, Langford took temporary leave of his usual solo label Bloodshot for NYC imprint ROIR, which had previously released Mekons and Three Johns one-offs. Subtitled Lies of the Great Explorers, or Columbus at Guantanamo Bay, it is an examination of post-9/11 American malaise and the impacts and shifting priorities of globalization.  Its first half focuses on individuals: the subjects of Little Bit of Help are “programmed for survival”; Workingman’s Palace chronicles the pressing need for escape, usually “where the Old Style light still shines”; Invisible Man illustrates regular folks’ 21st-century uncertainty, overlooked “like a pin in a map or dust on the screen.”  The title track addresses modernity’s solitude (“You leave home but you never leave home/Drive for miles in a car on your own”) and bland conformity (“The boring and phony/Are rocks for the lonely/To climb up on.”).  The second half dissects the U.S. mise en scène: Gorilla and the Maiden depicts Cold War Chicago’s incongruities of strip joints, Nazi marches, and investors who “paw at a city served up in chains”; Tall Ships imagines the vessels that carried many to the New World, now simply “carrying cargo/that nobody needs.”  An orchestrated cover of Procol Harum’s ’69 tune Salty Dog bridges the halves, in this context another depiction of immigration.  The finest piece is closing track Lost in America.  Composed for National Public Radio’s show of the same name and, in best Langford populist fashion, performed with musicians he found in the classifieds, it charts a course from pre-Colonial days to an imagined present where Columbus is detained by security and left to watch daytime TV, his mind reeling from the soulless progression of cartoons, game shows, and news-magazine exposés.  An astounding expository achievement, it should reassure anyone mistaking Gold Brick for a mere indictment of America: “We’ll turn the planes around today/And make them fly the other way/’Cos we know we’re all here to stay/And you know where you are/When you’re lost in America.”  Gold Brick examines a nation of proud individuals who may be a little worse for wear but who still believe in an American dream. It is Langford’s finest solo album to date and among the best work of his entire career.

Highlights: Lost in America, Gold Brick, All Roads Lead Back to Me, Invisible Man

Sublime bit: The beautiful arrangement of the title track, particularly Pat Brennan’s piano and Jean Cook’s violin lines.

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83. Natural

83. Natural, Mekons (Quarterstick, 2007)

For a time in the mid-Aughts, it was easy to think that the Mekons, veterans of the late-’70s Leeds punk scene, had fallen silent for good.  The majority of the band kept busy with other projects, and scattered across the globe (with a preponderance living in Chicago at one point or another) they had few chances to work as a cohesive unit.  The ’04 LP Punk Rock, comprising re-recordings of Mekons tunes from ’77-’81, seemed a self-issued eulogy.  Years passed with no full group live appearances.  There was no record-company turmoil keeping them from recording as in years past.  The arrival of Natural, then, was a relief to those in the cult of the group’s endearingly ramshackle live performances and literate yet pragmatically informal milieu.  The sassy militancy of their earliest work long gone, Aughts-model Mekons kept the rough-hewn melangé of guitar-bass-drums and violin-bouzouki-cümbüs harvested since their ’80s entrée to country and roots music while departing further from the rowdy energy of their ’90s work, nostalgic back-catalog visits notwithstanding.

Natural is, described lazily, an acoustic album; more accurately, though, it is a “natural” album.  The band’s ’00 effort Journey to the End of the Night (see #104) featured songs of apprehension and worry played very softly.  Natural is no mere wheedly-dee unplugged outing, and is often as worrisome in its subjects and more noisy in its execution as Journey.  Where that album’s dread spawned from the complicated vagaries of modern life, Natural is concerned with more earthy matters.  The Mekons tradition of peppering the inner sleeve with quotations, narratives, and historical trivia returns; while on Journey they pertained to tales of the grim urban underworld, Natural utilizes the likes of Charles Darwin, Scopes “Monkey” trial commentator H. L. Mencken, seventh-century astronomers, and geological talk and discussion of ancient stone formations.  The material world is generally met with suspicion; the Tom Greenhalgh-sung Zeroes and Ones, the album’s most aggressive track, describes ominously a world where reliance on technology leaves us “Strangers in nature/Aliens from god,” the alienating aspects of perpetual connectivity and accessibility leaving us “Lost forever, never lost.”  The sparse, hushed tune The Old Fox is a delicately pretty depiction of foxes walking over ice and searching for food in dustbins, their habitats bleeding into human society.  “Conditions are difficult/And full of responsibility,” we are told, as the voices of Greenhalgh, Jon Langford, and Sally Timms intertwine, trading gently overlapping vocal lines.  “It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks,” reads a quote from poet Anatole France; the Langford-sung Cockermouth embraces this spirit, its narrator rambling through the countryside.  “Jet fighters swooping loud and low/Rehearse for Armageddon,” but the protagonist gleefully sheds his clothes, conjures Thoreau, and gets lost on purpose.  “We used to dance/Around the stone head/It used to sing to us,” sings Langford in the haunting closing track Perfect Mirror, reprising a theme from the ’02 LP OOOH! (Out of Our Heads).  Natural knows that the temporal and the synthetic are forever mingled, the significance of antiquities such as stone heads permanently muted, but reminds us that it will always be beneficial to take walks and get lost.

Highlights: The Old Fox, Shocking Curse Bird, Diamonds, Zeroes and Ones

Sublime bit: The impassioned plea, after ten largely muted and reserved songs, of the group vocal on “Planets swirl, bodies entwine/I can’t hear you, you’re cutting out” at 1:53 of the album’s penultimate track, Zeroes and Ones.

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Bubbling Under #104. Journey to the End of the Night

104. Journey to the End of the Night, Mekons (Quarterstick, 2000)

It is pushing it to call Mekons a punk band thirty years after their birth at a Leeds art school. Their ’04 album Punk Rock featured reworkings of their ’70s material, a nostalgic lark alongside their later work that has long taken influence from American country music, English folk, and Jamaican rhythms. Mekons began the Aughts with 14th LP Journey to the End of the Night, its nocturnal themes of paranoia, dread, and lucklessness miles away from the ribald studies of sexuality on their prior record, Me (’98). Journey brims with anxiety: in Neglect, the narrator stands before a mirror, nauseated, practicing asking for £10,000.  In Last Weeks of the War, Jon Langford sings “I wipe the tapes but they keep playing/They haunt me another day.” The song title Tina refers to no woman but to an acronym for “there is no alternative.” Phone numbers are lost during fights, people appall themselves with impulsive confessions, and life flashes before the eyes “in the most unsatisfactory way.” Love is mentioned only as furtive or a source of agony. The band plays in hushed tones, not entirely acoustic but capturing the wee-hour loneliness of the cover image. Sally Timms practically whispers her lead vocals. For all the gloom, the music is not without joy; the closing tune, Last Night on Earth, boasts the album’s most jubilant arrangement while lyrically alluding to suicide. No mere retort to their live reputation as a reckless troop of jesters, the melancholy world of Journey gives voice to Mekons’ inward travels and sleepless dawns.

Highlights: Tina, Neglect, Powers & Horror

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.