Please excuse the poor quality - not my scan. Click to enlarge.

Angel Olsen and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (aka Will Oldham) are both having an incredibly busy year. Angel already released one of 2016’s best albums with My Woman, plus she contributed to the Mount Moriah and Cass McCombs albums. Will put out a Peel Sessions comp and a collab LP with Bitchin Bajas, plus contributed to LPs by Xylouris White and Matt Kivel (and definitely more that we’re forgetting). Both of them were also on that huge Grateful Dead tribute album. This week they’ll release an album together that pays tribute to another band, Mekons.

To read more , incl. ‘Oblivian’ track:

Recorded last summer in Brooklyn, this kinetic live album collects new politically-charged songs from the British art-punk O.G.s—a call to arms for all those pushing against the tides of modern life.

Back in 1987, the ROIR label released a tape called New York—one of many rather roughshod titles from the then-cassette-only New York outpost. The quasi-legit collection almost sounded like a bootleg, the kind of thing that would be traded in dubs from fan to fan. New York was the only live Mekons album ever in-print (though it was reissued in 2001 as New York: On the Road 86-87). That changes now with Existentialism.

Similarly, Existentialism also often sounds like a boot, but that’s a deliberate artistic decision. It was reportedly recorded around a single microphone at the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook, Brooklyn. At times, the rhythms overwhelm, yet this isn’t precisely a record that rocks. The Mekons long ago began weaving in elements of American country and British folk, threading it through the nervy art-punk at their core, a maneuver that only gains resonance as the band slides into middle age; it’s defiance that has turned into a credo. Older they may be, but they’re restless, and when Existentialism was recorded in the summer of 2015, the songs were as new to the band as they were to the audience. The Mekons chose to cut the songs not long after composition, a move that only underscores the urgency behind the project.

Despite the haste, there are no stumbles on Existentialism, though there is rawness. The group is too good to let things careen out of control, but they’re smart enough to play upon the suggestion that things could. Certainly, this adds passion to the performance; it’s the sound of a great band creating great noise. The album pushes levels into the red, but sometimes it suggests more sonic detail than could be achieved from one mic. There’s little separation in the harmonies, and plenty of midrange smear, but instruments pop to the forefront.

Beneath the racket, there are ideas—some expanded upon in an accompanying 96-page book and the Mekonception video that documents the whole shebang—but they’re impossible to ignore in the songs themselves. Images of terror, upheaval, and loss float through the words. Turmoil bubbles to the surface on “Fear and Beer,” a pub singalong for the age of Brexit, but “1848 Now!” makes allusions to revolution past, one of several sly nods to history. The best musical tip of the hat is how “The Cell” plays with the melody of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” without ever following its contours.

Politics and tradition are nothing new to the Mekons, but what makes Existentialism resonate is that it’s an album of the moment, for the moment. As an aural document, it’s kinetic and crackling, a live recording that captures the excitement of a concert. As a complete piece, it says something powerful; it’s a call to arms for old punks, unrepentant artists, and assorted freaks, all pushing against the tides of modern life. It’s the Mekons and friends and family gathering together in a small room, shouting songs of protest and singing sad melodies, realizing there’s strength in being together, even if their numbers are dwindling.

The Mekons thrive in the deep end

Whether it’s forming a band without really knowing how to play their instruments, flirting with country music even though there aren’t many cowboys or honky-tonks in their native Great Britain or making a live album with an unrehearsed choir of nonprofessional singers, the Mekons like to throw themselves into the deep end of things and see what happens.

All of the above “experiments” have worked out pretty well. The Mekons are among the longest-lived and most daring bands to emerge from the U.K. punk era, in part because of how the octet is able to absorb other musical languages — country, for example — and make something uniquely their own out of them.

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In some parallel universe, Mekons are huge rock stars. They’re worshiped for their legacy as first-wave Brit punks and adored for spending four decades evolving into something else entirely. Their hodgepodge of influences, from the Sex Pistols and Balfa Brothers to George Jones and King Tubby, only add to their popularity, and the one-time Leeds-based socialist collective are both recognized and respected as transformative pioneers.

It’s a nice thought. One that the band’s shamefully small legion of fans and advocates know is far more deserved than their status as perpetual underdogs.

To read more:

Rolling Stone

(incl. soundfile :Beaten and broken’)

In 2005, Robbie Fulks released “Countrier Than Thou,” a song with a rockabilly twang and Bukowski ramble that skewered the hypocrisy of those who lambast mainstream country but come from anywhere but the south (and, while he was at it, took a shot at George W. Bush, too). The Ivy League-educated Fulks, who lives in Chicago and has been making roots records for almost two decades, has never been particularly concerned with honoring birthright over creativity — and his newest collaboration with England’s cowpunk pioneers the Mekons is proof incarnate. Together, they created Jura, a collection of songs recorded during their 2014 U.K. tour. The song “Beaten and Broken” is premiering exclusively below on

“It sounded fun, to my wife at least,” Fulks tells Rolling Stone Country about the idea to head across the pond with the Mekons, a trip that would give rise to Jura. “She said, ‘Go to Scotland with the Mekons? How could you not?’ It has to be said that she hasn’t historically always had my best interests at heart. ‘Beaten and Broken’ was my favorite of the songs they sent me to learn — it’s fucking brilliant.”

Originally featured on the Mekons’ 1989 compilation Original Sin, Fulks’ vocals and strident strumming on “Beaten and Broken” transforms the song into half working-class bluegrass anthem, half Gaelic traditional, made even more poignant by the fact that it was recorded during the time when the Scottish were voting for independence. Or, maybe, the song was always that potent. After all, when the Mekons released pioneering albums like Fear and Whiskey in the Eighties, it wasn’t exactly commonplace to mesh leathered British punk with Nashville-born riffs. Now paired with Fulks, whose breed of folk honky-tonk mastered and satirized the same genres all at once, “Beaten and Broken” sounds natural, if not a little dangerous.

“We asked Robbie if he’d like to come on an adventure, and fill in for various missing Mekons,” says John Langford of the Mekons, about the unusual tour’s origins. “Tom [Greenhalgh] normally sings ‘Beaten and Broken,’ and one of Robbie’s tasks was to be Tom, which was kinda strange when Tom turned up unannounced halfway through the tour. Robbie changed the words of ‘Beaten and Broken’ and we enjoy the result.” Indeed, Fulks made small tweaks like swapping “died” for “sighed” at no expense to the raucous flow.

Fulks described Jura, the sparse Scottish isle that inspired the album and where it was recorded, as a place with “200 people, many more sheep, many, many more bottles of whiskey, and some number beyond fathoming of rocks and trees and clods of dirt.” In other words, perfect fodder for a record that captures the feeling of restless freedom dangling above great instability. With lots of whiskey thrown in for good measure.

Bloodshot press release:

As the story goes: Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland with more sheep than people, so bare and infertile the Vikings passed it by, is a place replete with longing, isolation and remote Gaelic oddness. It’s where George Orwell went slighty mad and finished 1984.

It is also where folk-punk lifers The Mekons teamed up with Chicago’s musical polyglot Robbie Fulks for a month to record this limited-edition collection of rough sea shanties and mournful tales pulled from the fog of the bay and the fog of the local whiskey distillery. Here are songs to be whispered over a dung fire in a sparse peasant’s cottage, the incessant winds being your only constant companion, or to be sung while pounding the pint glass on the pub’s rail. Or, perhaps, to be wailed into the tempests beyond the cliffs, to wonder if they’ll ever be heard. The songs were organically written together, covered, or taken from traditionals and played by all of the assembled cast of musicians or by a select few. Includes the re-working of the Mekons classic “Beaten and Broken,” which, with Fulks at the vocal helm sounds, according to Rolling Stone “natural, if not a little dangerous.”

The cycle of music crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic continues in wonderful and weird ways.

From the rather hilarious liner notes written by Robbie Fulks, which kind of sums up the vibe of the time: “Maybe you’ve heard the long joke with the cowboy and the lesbian at the bar, where the lesbian tells the cowboy in great detail what she does as a lesbian, and then asks the cowboy what he does. He replies uncertainly, “I thought I was a cowboy…” Well, I thought I was a drunk. Then I met the Mekons. Their drunkenness approached the heroic, the hard-to-believe, a drunkenness as sky-reaching as the drifts of snow in nineteenth-century snow disaster stories or green groaning piles of turtles in Dr. Seuss. No day trip was so tight that multiple pub stops, starting about noon, couldn’t be shoehorned in. No night ended without jugs of peaty brown swill upended, and no night ended as it decently should have. There was staggering, backslapping, laughing into tears, bobble-headed nods into unconsciousness, loss of motor function, and out-of-doors vomiting. But that was all me; the Mekons were so at one with liquor that, with a couple notable exceptions, no amount of it changed them.”

Reviews
Exclaim:

So, Bloodshot records label mates Robbie Fulks and (most of) the Mekons went on a tour of Scotland together, stopped off at a tiny fishing island called Jura and recorded an album of a) old sea shanties, and b) songs of theirs that sound just like old sea shanties, possibly while staggeringly drunk. Many alt-country fans will have already downloaded Jura before they’ve finished reading the above description.

For those who haven’t, here’s more of the appeal: Robbie Fulks is a cranky, hyper-intelligent beanpole who mines centuries of American music to make albums full of songs that can be viciously clever, or hopelessly tender, sometimes both at once. The Mekons are one of the old-school punk-turned-country bands whose proletarian balladry made the genre shift with ease. Together, they work. After all, the sea shanty, like the American drinking song, and like the punk anthem, is music to sing with other people. The album sounds like a house party rather than a concert. One can easily imagine the live show, a tiny bar or kitchen, filled to the brim, everyone in the audience belting out the lyrics back at the band.

In fact, the great flaw of this album is that it isn’t a concert, and the listener is not right there with the band; it feels disconcerting to be listening to an album of alternately rollicking and mournful populist sing-alongs while alone in one’s living room. You could crank it up, guzzle whiskey and join in on the choruses nonetheless, but your roommates, and/or children, might never let you live it down.

American Songwriter:

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This meeting between the scrappy likes of American alt-country/folk-rocker Fulks and UK punk/folk veterans the Mekons was birthed from a 2014 tour that featured both Bloodshot artists. Someone decided it would be a good idea to haul away to the remote titular island off the coast of Scotland (that has “more sheep than people”) and let fly on a set of acoustic, predominantly traditional fare. These 11 tracks, recorded in just three days with Fulks and a five member subset of Jon Langford’s ever evolving group dubbed the “mini-Mekons,” are the result.

It’s an organic, rootsy set of typically edgy and sea shanty-styled UK folk tunes, murder ballads and general story songs that feel like they have been around for hundreds of years. Accordions, fiddles, guitars and harmonium combine on the songs, many about the ocean such as “The Last Fish in the Sea,” Shine on Silver Seas,” “Land Ahoy!” and others. They capture the rustic, Scottish vibe with authenticity and occasionally the inebriated, shaggy tilt that has characterized much of the Mekons’ output over the decades. The waltz time drunken rambling of “Beaten and Broken” and “I Say Hang Him!” sound like something the Pogues might have dug into. And anytime we get to hear the wonderful vocals of Sally Timms, as on a few key, mostly somber tracks, it’s always a treat, even if some are hypnotic dirges.

Fulks only sings lead on three tunes such as the bluesy harmonica driven “Refill,” the disc’s most American-styled selection that even mentions Missouri. He is also featured on the humorous “Getting on With It,” a lusty slice of Brit folk that suggests a body of land getting discovered by explorers might not be in everyone’s best interest.

The album exudes the salty air of the conditions it was recorded in, which makes it a success on that level. How much your tastes lean towards undiluted, traditional Brit folk will gauge your enjoyment for this batch of unadulterated music in that genre, played and conceived with the purest of intentions.