The Mekons: Journey To The End Of The Night : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Since their birth in 1977, the Mekons have presented themselves as everything from hopped-up punk rockers to radical country cousins. Their thirteenth studio LP is predictably unpredictable: Where 1998's Me was a lounge, rock and electronic-breakbeat party, on Journey to the End of the Night the Mekons settle into a single stylistic groove of melancholy electric ballads and languid reggae. The album's structure is almost narrative: A lonesome cumbƒs signals "the first light of dawn" on "Myth"; for the next eleven tracks, vocalist-guitarists Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh troll like somber picaros through an inky urban world limned by Suzie Honeyman's violin and singer Sally Timms' lilting vibrato (see "Last Weeks of the War"). The album closes with "Last Night on Earth," the band's defiant spit into the eye of darkness: "The system is sick . . . they can't hurt you now," Langford offers in a hoarse, reassuring rant. As the song fades, the refrain from the opening track returns to herald a new beginning. It's a perfect metaphor for a band of survivors who are as comfortable with shattering continuity as they are with embodying it. (RS 838)

NEVA CHONIN