If you subscribe to the dubious theory that most white folks should be banned from rapping, dabbling in the blues, or forming perma-peppy ska bands, it might follow that Brits shouldn’t be tackling Americana. When you come from a country that knows nothing of lost highways or white-trash trailer parks, what can you possibly add [...]

As a songwriter, performer, producer and general alt-country agitator, Jon Langford carries a considerable discography. Add these to the list: A solo debut he produced for Chumbawamba frontman Danbert Nobacon, and the latest installment from the Mekons, the art-punk mothership that brought Langford to prominence exactly 30 years ago. Nobacon is a difficult character to [...]

In Jon Langford’s spooky paintings, country music stars of a lost era gaze into space glazed with joy, as if frozen in a tomb buried by neglect and Shania Twain’s navel. American decay is always on Langford’s mind, yet even as he and others have taken potshots for punchlines, his new album is tilted head [...]

Jon Langford and Richard Buckner aren’t such polar opposites as, say, Jay-Z and the Beatles, but this joint venture has some of the same left-field appeal of an unexpected pop mash-up: It’s most interesting for the ways in which each player’s talents connect, collide, or combine to create something unexpected or altogether new. The more [...]

So what’s it like to listen to the Waco Brothers as a guy? Do you want to be them? Do you want to take them on? Do you want to drink them under the table? Or do they scare you, too? My fandom has always been complicated by fascination with all that fearsome, noisy manpower [...]

The hardest working man in show business? That’s easy: Jon Langford. Since 1998, he’s been the key man on more than a dozen albums with the Sadies, Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Waco Brothers, Sally Timms, and perhaps first among equals, the Mekons, the infinitely evolving, organically changing entity that sprouted from the first wave of British [...]

The Sadies’ signature melange of honky-tonk-surf-rhythm-&-blues perfectly suits this collection, in which Jon Langford unleashes his angry heart on the dark side of manhood (ambivalent love, indiscriminate aggression, the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle), hurtling headlong, bruised and half-blinded, riddled with remnants of what could be self-knowledge and compassion. Like another Langford side-project, Skull Orchard, this [...]

Johnboy Langford and his Wobbly Bottom Boys are back in action — term used loosely, as “action” in the Wacos’ world is generally squinted at from under a dive’s table, flat on one’s back. Seriously, the Pogues ain’t got nuthin’ on these inebriates. Yet somehow when it comes to getting the musical job done, the [...]

Over the Mekons’ 25-year history, the band’s strongest works have been the result of flat-out ballsy experiments in synthesizing disparate musical forms. It may be country, punk, folk, loops and samples, or spoken word that they’re blending into the mix, but when the band nails it, they sound like no one else. (Hell, on a [...]