Now that Chumbawamba have made the pop charts safe for quasi-anarchist British drinking songs, maybe the Mekons can finally get a hit – after all, these resilient socialist punks from Leeds have been getting knocked down and getting up again for more than twenty years now. The Mekons' art achieved its pinnacle on the brilliantly wasted, deracinated roots music of 1985's Fear and Whiskey and 1989's blistering Rock and Roll; since then they've sustained an honorable career as a reliably fabulous honkytonking live act making increasingly less-necessary records.

But on Me, the Mekons' first album of the Puff Daddy era – possible alternate title: Mekons So Horny – they take the time-honored low road to pop success via a healthy obsession with sex. There's little trace of the band's trademark punk C&W on this beats-filled concept album about desire, narcissism and TV. Sally Timms' recitation of a shopping list of banal consumer products – Tampax, Slim Fast, laxatives – in the catchy "Enter the Lists" suggests a Marxist critique of daily life in late capitalism, but what really sticks with you is the catchy way her sly, breathy laugh loops over Steve Goulding's surging rhythms. Not to mention the way she and John Langford trade off lyrics about porn and sex toys like a potty-mouthed Ike and Tina in the aptly named "Tourettes." On Me, the Mekons make pissing the night away and talking dirty seem like acts of revolution. (RS 788)

IVAN KREILKAMP