Jon Langford's a Wales native who made his first mark in the late 1970s with the eminently British post-punk of the Mekons, but he's lived in America for decades and has been paying homage to American roots music even longer. Starting with the Mekons’ 1985 album Fear and Whiskey, folk and country have played large parts in almost all of Langford’s releases, both with the Mekons and on his many side projects such as Waco Brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. It’s his solo albums, though, that have been the most intimate showcases of Langford’s fascination with Americana. From the cantankerous, country-sucks-today rabblerousing of 2004’s All the Fame of Lofty Deeds to the honky-tonk-infused frolic of 2010’s Old Devils, Langford keeps a taut leash on tradition.
So “Summer Stars,” a song from Here Be Monsters, Langford’s new solo album with his backing band Skull Orchard (a revolving ensemble named after his 1998 solo debut), comes as a surprise. It begins with an eerie science-fiction monologue—calling to mind that Langford’s older brother David is a renowned sci-fi author specializing in satire and pastiche—that lovingly taps into the space-glam wondrousness of T. Rex and David Bowie. Langford’s voice remains gruff and gregarious, a tattered flag still happily flapping over a landscape littered with the bones of his contemporaries who didn’t make it.
He later covers “Don’t Believe”, a sparse and frostbitten meditation on faithlessness from the Slits member Viv Albertine's 2012 solo debut The Vermilion Border. As a show of post-punk solidarity, it’s downright heartwarming, and it’s not the album’s only trace of latent Anglophilia. "What Did You Do In The War?” lurches and laments like a lost Richard and Linda Thompson B-side, complete with a give-and-take duet courtesy of piercing guest vocalist Tawny Newsome; “Gone Without Trace” is an upbeat, practically rollicking pub-pop anthem straight out of Billy Bragg’s playbook. Elsewhere, genre distinctions melt in the simmering melancholy of “Mars”, the album’s slowest and most tension-riddled track. The song's a bookend to “Summer Stars” that subtracts gravity from the proceedings and lets Langford’s hoarse whispers, his plaintive guitar twang, and Jean Cook’s mournful violin hang in midair, harrowingly unresolved.
Still, Americana has not lost its grip on Langford, nor vice versa. A thread of ragged, country-rock glory runs through “Sugar on Your Tongue”, a tender paean to bittersweet regret, and—in what seems to be Langford’s fixation on g-forces (or the lack thereof)—the dusty, tumbleweed-like drift of “Weightless.” The subject matter represents a loose theme in Langford’s work that stretches all the way back to the Mekons’ Sally Timms-sung ballad “Ghosts of American Astronauts”; even on “Summer Stars,” the song’s Major Tom-esque narrator cites not Bowie, but one of Langford’s more obvious Stateside heroes: “From the North down to the South/ Hank Williams' mouth will fill the sky”. Williams’ voice has certainly loomed large in Langford’s horizons for a long time now, along with those of Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, and many of the other country legends that he's absorbed and digested over the decades. The dilution of purist fidelity makes Here Be Monsters one of Langford’s least focused albums in recent memory, but it also ends up as one of his richest.
