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<\/a><\/p>\nIn their nearly 50 years since forming in Leeds during the punk era of the late ’70s, the Mekons have created a cohesive body of work marked by a certain aesthetic and creative itch, even while amassing an idiosyncratic catalog and frequently seemingly deconstructing whatever had come before. Indeed, there\u2019s an agitant attitude that\u2019s also been a constant, so that by the time of only their second single, \u201cWhere Were You,\u201d the Mekons were already casting a collective scant eye at punk\u2019s heyday as they looked toward the future. In those subsequent decades, they have been in and out of step with the times at varied periods, but always been a source of antagonistic ideas (ideals?) and musical ingenuity and integrity.<\/p>\n
The band, which featured the lineup that\u2019s made up the Mekons since the mid-80s (only Lu Edmonds, who was presumably off on tour with PiL, was missing), played to a soldout crowd at the Boston outpost of the City Winery chain last week in support of what\u2019s perhaps its strongest record of the past couple decades, Horror<\/i>. As founding member and singer\/guitarist Jon Langford pointed out (and emphasized by screaming the name of the record every time the band played a song from it), it\u2019s a sign of the times we\u2019re living in (as are several members of the band, unless they\u2019ve come to their senses and moved back to the UK). The alarm bells were loudest on \u201cWar Economy,\u201d a defiant cut sung by another founding member, singer\/guitarist Tom Greenhalgh, who posited, \u201cYou have no right to rule us.\u201d Numerous moments from the band\u2019s past work would also seem equally prescient, but \u201cMillionaire\u201d from 1993\u2019s I \u2665 Mekons<\/i> was a good, if obvious, choice as it elicited the crowd to sing the song\u2019s ironic refrain of “I love a millionaire.”<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, some of the best moments of the night were more sentimental than topical. \u201cChivalry,\u201d and \u201cLast Dance\u201d from the band\u2018s seminal Fear and Whiskey<\/i> were among the highlights, with Susie Honeyman\u2019s fiddle underpinning Greenhalgh\u2019s reveries. Meanwhile, on \u201cNeglect\u201d (from 2000\u2019s Journey to the End of the Night<\/i>), Langford took the lead, melding his low-key reggae-tinged riff with Rico Bell\u2019s \u201cchest piano\u201d (as he called it) for a pleasant surprise. Still, it was hard to ignore the raucous poignancy of \u201cHard to Be Human\u201d (also from Fear and Whiskey<\/i>) and the cathartic yowling of its title that closed their first set.<\/p>\n
The band left the stage, but returned shortly for a four-song encore. No surprise, it would finish with \u201cWhere Were You,\u201d but it was the song that preceded it, \u201cMemphis, Egypt,\u201d and its refrains about rock & roll and verses like, \u201cThe battles we fought were long and hard,\u201d that resonated and revealed more of the band\u2019s everlasting ethos. As singer Sally Timms commented at one point, we need to keep our spirits up during these difficult times, and this show certainly did a good job of elevating them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In their nearly 50 years since forming in Leeds during the punk era of the late ’70s, the Mekons have created a cohesive body of work marked by a certain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":8871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[2682,1443],"class_list":["post-8869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-whats-the-rumpus","tag-the-mekons","tag-whats-the-rumpus"],"yoast_head":"\n
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