Of all the punk rock bands who appeared in the U.K. in the wake of the Sex Pistols, the Mekons are one of the few who are not only still a going concern, but have managed to maintain their peerless creative principles and individuality along the way. However, while the Mekons have never stopped being punk in their intelligent, contrarian view of the world, they've barely sounded like a rock band in the 2010s, embracing a folkie austerity on 2011's Ancient & Modern and 2015's Jura, and generating a stripped-down and manipulated experimental sound on 2017's Existentialism. So it's good to report that the Mekons are sounding a bit more feisty on 2019's Deserted, and if no one is going to mistake these songs for "Never Been in a Riot" or "Where Were You?" the adventurous embrace of electric and acoustic instruments, the clouds of random noise that drift through the music, and the mildly sloppy but emphatic unity of the performances put this in a league with stellar '90s efforts such as The Curse of the Mekons, I Love Mekons, and Me. Deserted was largely written and recorded during a sojourn in the California desert not far from Joshua Tree National Park, and the surroundings certainly had an impact on the music. Deserted is full of broad but sparsely populated sonic landscapes, interrupted by episodes of chaos and hallucinatory beauty, and shifting patterns of instrumental textures and individual and massed vocals. Much of the material was written in the studio, and the results have a playful but daring sense of adventure, as well as a smart, mildly addled sense of awe at the beauty and danger that surrounds them in the arid heat. Deserted is less explicitly political than one might expect from the Mekons, especially compared to Existentialism, but the wit, the smarts, and the mingled twang and skronk of the music could be the work of no other band, and this is their most immediately engaging album in 20 years. Longevity is one thing, but sticking around without going stale is a trickier matter, and Deserted demonstrates that more than four decades on, the Mekons are as fresh and challenging as ever.
© Mark Deming /TiVo