Consumer Guide Album

The Mekons: The Curse of the Mekons [Blast First, 1991]
Repulsed after storming capitalism's citadels with the well-named Rock 'n' Roll, they fall back exhausted, dissociated, spewing analysis and country songs and putting more oomph into the latter. The same Sally Timms who sounds suspiciously like Susie Honeyman outlining the history of the heroin trade delivers John Anderson's putatively apolitical "Wild and Blue" like a sybil at a battered women's shelter; the same Tom Greenhalgh who calls out a "bourgeois sorcerer" in a bemused falsetto praises "magic, fear and superstition" as lustily as George Jones. Yet they continue to face down bourgeois sorcerers, earning the right to thank Jesus that "beer" rhymes with "career." A−