Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com:
Thirty years is a long time to be involved with any profession, much less the notoriously soul-draining music business. But the ability of the Mekons to continue doing it without becoming jaded or redundant lies in their embrace of variety and their slippery punk/rock/country/whatever approach. For this, their 26th record, main Mekons Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh have concocted a mostly acoustic, folksy contemplation of modern life that nevertheless sounds ancient. The songs are like sea chanteys, messy and simple but haunted, as if the melodies had their origins in some long-dead Druid society. But the lyrics are something else, referencing everything from terrorism ("Burning in the Desert, Burning") and the computer age ("Ones and Zeroes"), to the perils of aging (the wonderful "Dickie Chalkie and Nobby"). Elsewhere, "White Stone Door" uses percussive instrumentation to liven up Sally Timms's dark, wistful vibrato, while "Cockermouth" features the uneasy line "you have to believe this is the end." It's pretty dour stuff on the whole, but delivered with playfully melodic wit and a certain poetic resignation usually found only in the hearts of forgotten souls and madmen (and maybe Tom Waits). We ignore such sad wisdom at our peril. --Matthew Cooke

Rating : - more great Mekons in the vein of their last two
After five years, Mekons fans like myself were "naturally" anxious to hear the new record. Recorded in a bucolic Lake District setting, NATURAL does indeed have a folksy, rootsy ambience, though it is not entirely acoustic.

Framed by two powerful, somber songs, "Dark, Dark, Dark" and the lovely "Perfect Mirror," NATURAL follows naturally from the last two Mekons albums of new material, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT (2000 -- see my review), and OUT OF OUR HEADS! (2002 -- see my review). It is only because NATURAL is not quite as strong as those records that I give it 4 stars. In its own right it is a great album, make no mistake, 12 songs from Jon, Sally, Tom & the others that add up to something greater than the sum of the parts -- don't miss it! Remember, life is short and the world is full of sonic crap.

After Tom's stunning "Perfect Mirror," my favorite songs are Sally's "The Hope and the Anchor" and Jon's "Cockermouth," which together represent an emotional high point after the depressing "Burning, in the Desert Burning," which is about religious fundamentalism. Sally sounds tender and optimistic, and despite jet fighters rehearsing for Armageddon, and the ominous ambiguity of "you don't have to believe in the end, you have to believe this is the end," Langford is carefree over a reggae beat, singing about rambling over the hills.

The Mekons are one a handful of bands that are precious to people like me who persist in dreaming of a better world. As the Oysterband says on their latest, I'm "unimpressed, unreconciled" to the world of global capital, messianic religious war, war for oil, and ecological devastation.

Now if I could only see the Mekons live on tour this fall!