Merging 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.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.
Breakdown is the song's theme (the phrase is repeated over and over) and, to a degree, the album's as a whole. Though their lyrics have veered increasingly toward abstraction over their last two albums, the Mekons here turn their eye on a whole Western culture that ranges from the idyllic (cricket games, village greens) to the apocalyptic (the band's escalating interest in eschatological pronouncements) and registers a weariness and a resignation, but also the continued possibility of insubordination. "I was tempted to believe," howls Langford on "Space in Your Face," neatly encapsulating the band's negotiation of optimism and acquiescence.
