After spending the better part of a decade trying to get across with abrasive leftist polemics, the Mekons stepped back and made a record for themselves. What they came up with after the smoke and the hangovers cleared was the album of their career, 1985's Fear and Whiskey. They left the chain-saw guitars and dance-club rhythms behind and replaced them with the more modest sounds of Fifties country & western. The songs themselves offered no release: the album closed with a grand cover of Hank Williams's "Lost Highway" that made merely staying alive sound like a fulltime job. To keep the proceedings from turning sour, the Mekons became the sloppiest band in the world. This revolving crew of motley characters, built around cofounder Jon Langford (nobody's quite sure who's in the band), makes the Replacements sound like studio pros.

With their 1986 album The Edge of the World, and now with Honky Tonkin', their first-ever U.S. release, the Mekons (an octet at last count) are trying to warm their brutal landscape. The knockout cover this time is a wobbly take on Gram Parsons's dark "Sleepless Nights"; the new originals, like "Hole in the Ground," a honky-tonk ramble that verges on rockabilly, and the hilarious "Sympathy for the Mekons," expand the territory the band staked out on their last two albums. It would be naive to suggest that the future of anything should rest on the shoulders of the Mekons. But in a stuffy rock world, couldn't we use a heavy dose of their gotta-laugh-to-keep-from-dying attitude? (RS 503)

JIMMY GUTERMAN