Jura reviews & Bloodshot press release
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.”
– See more at: https://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/jura#sthash.Jy7MIs4o.dpuf
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.”
– See more at: https://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/jura#sthash.Jy7MIs4o.dpuf
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.”
– See more at: https://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/jura#sthash.Jy7MIs4o.dpuf
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.”
– See more at: https://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/jura#sthash.Jy7MIs4o.dpuf
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.