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Jon Langford and His Sadies: Mayors of the Moon

Talk about a match made in the nether parts a bit below heaven!!! Who better to combine forces and arrive at a whole new turn in American music than the Welsh lefty and the fleet-fingered Canadians so attuned in all things surfy, westerny, and lysergically twangy?

Mayors of the Moon takes the punk chutzpah of Langford and meshes it with the garage/roots savvy of the Sadies and busts out 12 tracks that rattle the cage of genre purists. Jon's lyrical tension between the angry and the resigned gets juiced as never before with The Sadies' chameleon-like ability to play it all.

Likewise, The Sadies rollicking and spooky take on American roots idioms is given an exhilirating sense of urgency when it serves as a backdrop for Jon's tales of the personal and the political. Music gets boring when everyone plays by the rules and sticks to the straight and narrow, and sometimes it takes a bunch of outsiders to show us how many more places music can take us.

Here is how Jon describes the experience of recording with the Sadies:

"I have only to gaze down at my stubby, Anglo-Welsh, peasant fingers to see all my musical shortcomings manifested in flesh. I have seen the Sadies hands! With chilled admiration I gaped at the smooth white palms and firm elegant knuckles, the flurry of ringmasters and pointers, each one precision engineered for speed with extra joints and bonus inches added, as they reached down to pull me gently, higher up the evolutionary ladder.

Some pointed out, unkindly I'm sure, that had I really wished to present myself as older, grayer, stockier, and less talented than I already am, the dramatic relief into which this collaboration would throw me could not have been more perfect. I agreed. I'd have so little to do with this record I'd feel like Cliff Richard. A few flood-damaged lyric sheets scooped off the basement floor and into a jiffy bag and let the Canadians do the rest! Or so I thought! North of the border things work a little differently.

Through clouds of choking smoke and ash, fine mists of piss and Molson, they strung my bloated carcass high up in the twisted, twining branches of some evil fucking oak trees where roots, thorns and vines scagged at my neck and eyes, and ripped my clenched jaws asunder, tugging my tongue out from behind my teeth and forced me to sing like I'd never sung before. Then we went to Blue Rodeo's excellent new studio in Toronto's Greektown, drank Greg Keelor's finest port and bashed around for a couple of days, sharing jokes, responsibilities and mutual admiration for free medical care for all. Here's the result! Jon Langford and His Sadies! The Mayors Of The Moon!

FYI: They used to be Sally Timms friends, BUT, they are mine now and I will guard them jealously."

"The best album of Americana I've heard in some time -- and it took a Welshman and a bunch of Canadians to make it." Monica Kendrick, Chicago Reader

"I'm less touched by single tracks than by the way he unfurls song after song, abstract but urgent, inked up with tattoos and bruises. What raises [these songs] up isn't the particulars of his politics so much as the way Langford body-Englishes principle into passion, and integrates humour with a snort of disgust." Carl Wilson, The Globe and Mail

"A winning collection of folk and rockabilly... that merges punk bravado with the grit of Americana." J. Edward Keyes, Philadelphia Weekly

"The Sadies' instinctive sympathy for Langford's voice and lyrics shine in these 12 songs, making the songs seem informal while songcraft proves otherwise." Dante Garland, Harp

"Biting criticism thinly veiled as barrelhouse country tunes cuts to the heart of the matter. Who knew that such rhetoric could make such exhilarating music?" Andria Lisle, Stereo-Type

"Lyrics that despair of politics, find true pain in true love, unhinge from terra firma, and gripe about the road are delivered with country plainness, glimmers of spirituality, plenty of rolled r's, and the sense that by singing reality you can make it mean something." Robert Christgau, Village Voice

"It's Langford and the Sadies, in remarkable cohesion, who drive this record convincingly into our millennial malaise, and ultimately bivouac substantially closer to Steve Earle than either the rowdy Wacos or the venerable Mekons." Linda Ray, No Depression

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