And what beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
By definition the record industry is structurally compelled to produce waste in vast unimaginable quantities.
– Mekons, Living In Sin
Elvis Presley’s ghostly visage peers ominously from behind a tangle of laser drippings, situated ambiguously between savior and Satan. Gabriel’s trumpet, oddly sour and discordant, sounds as the putative saved are mired in a distracted solipsism. Slave ships loom menacingly off the shores, poised to reconquer an unsuspecting Americay. Yet capitalismo’s favorite boy child, rock ‘n’ roll, lumbers on — an all-consuming beast and a blithely dancing corpse, a grizzled whore and a ready combustible for the market’s fire.
Five years into a second coming marked by the rough-and-tumble alt-country forebear Fear And Whiskey, the Mekons’ great subject inevitably emerged as…the Mekons themselves — specifically, their contentious relationship with their chosen medium. From its opening battle cry, “Destroy your safe and happy home,” 1989′s The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll stages a blistering, take-no-prisoners offensive from within the belly of the beast. Roaming a post-apocalyptic terrain of vampyres and evil-dead, our heroes wage war against an empire of the senseless with the grim innards of “Hard To Be Human” exposed to the harsh desert sun, an angry rebuke to the unseen power brokers and moneymen.
Recognizing the deceptively suggestive title conceit as both statement and action, the band’s most overtly scabrous (and trenchant) sloganeering is matched with their most coruscating (and assured) musical assault. Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh’s guitars grapple and roil like Spanish bombs and guns of Brixton. Susie Honeyman, usually good for a dollop of color and a dash of much-needed sweetening, here attacks her fiddle with all the subtlety of Timon Dogg’s “Lose This Skin”. And drummer Steve Goulding, a steadying pulse during the band’s Sin-ful DIY past, covers his mates’ advance with a holy terror of artillery.
If Fear And Whiskey chronicled a ragtag collective’s anti-heroic quest for a war to lose, then Rock ‘n’ Roll revisits the same motley bunch, older if not wiser, with quixotic notions of impending victory. Not surprisingly, the subsequent battle was a rout…in the guise of a non-event. Amidst a volley of painfully familiar recriminations (A&M’s uncomprehending marketing effort, the band’s ill-conceived touring strategy), the album floundered, unceremoniously belched from the heart of the capitalist machine it was sent to destroy.
With their second major-label tenure apparently in jeopardy, legend has it that the band’s corporate champion, Steve Ralbovsky, urged the Mekons to cut loose and “have some fun” with an EP. Their response: F.U.N. ’90, a collection of folk-and-roots-identified covers reimagined as off-the-one dance-club readymades and capped by a droogy beat collage featuring the postmortem ministrations of Lester Bangs. Needless to say, A&M was not amused. The follow-up proper, The Curse Of The Mekons, purportedly delivered too late for crucial college radio support, was consigned to distribution limbo. (Until Collector’s Choice’s long overdue and much appreciated reissues, it was available in the States as a Blast First import only.)
Conflating “magic, fear and superstition” with “freedom, power and authority,” The Curse envisions an unholy coupling of politics, commerce and the dark arts — a dire alchemy played out across the album’s titles: “Authority”, “Secrets”, “Sorcerer”, “The Curse”, “Brutal”, and of course, “The Funeral”. With socialism (i.e., anti-capitalism) in tatters and the dread beast America intent on transforming the Middle East to glass, the Mekons courted irrelevance if not non-existence (if not never-existence).
Where Rock ‘n’ Roll launched its dizzying assault from the boozy expanse of Langford’s bellow, The Curse digs in behind Greenhalgh’s pinched, mordantly detached delivery. Effecting an original if somewhat discomfiting marriage of postpunk-inflected honky-tonk and droning synthesizer textures, the album is claustrophobic and arid, its many dead spots haunted by the ghosts of fallen comrades — call it No F.U.N. ’91. And yet the Mekons’ tactical retreat fairly shimmers with frayed beauty and tarnished majesty.
Sally Timms’ clarion vocals soar above the album’s forbidding wasteland, ringing with clarity of purpose, albeit offering scant hope of sanctuary. Her four entries give the project lift, shape and vitality: Europe under fascism’s boot, McDrug’s government-abetted ascent, a waltz with Armageddon, and a lovely and mournful “Wild And Blue” (I humbly propose Sally Timms Sings John Anderson).
Sometimes clarity of purpose provides its own imperative. Be it the Mekons, socialism or even rock ‘n’ roll, this funeral is definitely for the wrong corpse.
