A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. They're an art-and-literature collective that happens to play music too, a small community who used to be punks together, a hydra whose three heads each sing in a different voice. They've also effectively become process artists. The ideas that shape their songs, and the means by which they create them, are the important part; the songs themselves are basically just documentation.
That makes latter-day albums like Ancient & Modern very interesting in a contemporary-art context, and occasionally tough-going in a putting-on-recordings-and-listening-to-them context. If you're waiting for them to write another "Where Were You?" or "Memphis, Egypt" or "Now We Have the Bomb", don't hold your breath; it's hard to imagine most of these songs being the kind of thing grouchy old guys at Mekons shows yell for. (Mekons shows are heavily populated by grouchy old guys.)
The ostensible concept behind this record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago. It's a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title-- although, of course, with their ties to the art world, Mekons know that titles can carry a lot of weight. Opacity, though, is a persistent problem on Ancient & Modern. A lot of its lyrics might as well have been assembled exquisite-corpse style: "Calling All Demons" wanders from "a reptile thinking its first thoughts" to the head of John the Baptist to "a fan-club meeting down the steps on Briggate" to "ice cream, eggs and bread," and so on. A couple of its lines seem to allude to Oscar Wilde, but that's the only point of coherence to someone who wasn't in the room when it was written.
Still, Mekons know when they've come up with a good phrase, and how to build an arrangement around it. On the title track, it's "I had a minor breakdown," repeated as a refrain while a tiny, four-note figure loops and loops; on Jon Langford's splenetic rocker "Space in Your Face", it's "I was tempted to believe," howled by an ensemble with someone's devotional humming behind them; on the old-timey strut "Geeshie", it's Sally Timms ending some lines with "while there's still time" and others with "try to still time." (That last appears to be a tribute to Geeshie Wiley, the mysterious singer-guitarist who recorded her haunting "Last Kind Word Blues" in 1930. Again, the title's the only explicit cue.)
The other thing Mekons have picked up from contemporary art practice is the principle that, once you've established your voice, you can keep doing variations on the same thing indefinitely. Their lineup has been fairly stable for a couple of decades now, and it's hard to imagine a band more comfortable with each other's playing than they are. When they feel like it, they can conjure moments of disarming beauty. ("I fall asleep when I should pray," Timms and Tom Greenhalgh repeat together-- she's clear-voiced and reserved, he's quavering and sardonic-- and then the song briefly dissolves into a dubbed-out froth of piano and violin before resuming.) When they don't, they still sound like no one but Mekons: prickly, jovial, boozy, resistant to the bourgeois pleasures of rhyme and tune but sometimes seduced by them anyway. For anyone who's not already a Mekons enthusiast, though, this has to be an alarmingly forbidding, cryptic piece of work.
