Bloodshot Drinking Buddies, Jon Langford, Rico Bell, Sally Timms Mekons -- "Ancient & Modern"

"A thorny mix of antiquey folk, squalling punk and Weimar-era cabaret" --Washington Post

"Meaty and grizzled folk rock...After all these years, you still want to join them." --Rolling Stone

"The Mekons have made their discontent more aesthetically appealing on Ancient & Modern, but if their rage is more graceful, it's no less powerfully felt, and the intelligence and care that went into this album ultimately makes its dour message cut even deeper; it's the Mekons' most accomplished bit of record making in some time." --ALLMUSIC.COM

"The Mekons see a bit of today reflected in these songs, which have implications beyond their setting. It is, ultimately and unsurprisingly, a deeply angry and contentious album, yet one that glories in the act of musical collaboration. It took a World War to bring the first Edwardian Era to a close. The Mekons sound like they’re having a blast pondering what it will take to end this second one." --Paste

"The main musical thrust is a sort of exotic folk rock, mostly British in origin and supporting the usual provocative lyrical barbs, but with the flavors of every other musical spice the band has picked up in its nearly 35 years of existence... The result is one of the Mekons’ most enticing records, rewarding multiple spins and signaling a band still in the prime of its long life." --The Big Takeover

"For more than three decades, Mekons have been a band that can do no wrong musically" --American Songwriter

Sonic adventurers, punk rock fundamentalists, exuberant luddites, willing outcasts...

Mekons formed in Leeds, England 34 years ago in 1977 and Ancient & Modern is their 26th album. This current classic line-up has remained intact since the mid-1980's. Throughout their history, they have worked collaboratively and collectively with everything credited to the band, never to individuals. Their mind-boggling output consistently blurs the lines between high art and low and has included exhibitions in the UK and US, a deranged musical recorded and staged with Kathy Acker, an art performance with Vito Acconci and several books including the unique art catalog/unfinished novel "Mekons United."

On Ancient & Modern the Mekons bring you an “album” just like albums used to be; cardboard things filled with cheeky, chunky 78rpm shellac.  Just take a look at the cover of Ancient & Modern and you’ll know what we’re talking about! Let the band take you for a walk down memory lane, to the world as it was just before the First World War ... to the Edwardian Era, to the Naughty Naughties a hundred years ago, a cozy nostalgic world: cricket on the village green, punting down the river in a striped blazer and boater, off with the hounds, picnic hampers, community singing, mistresses and wives, mysticism, secret societies, dangerous poetry, radical modern art, Freud, national strikes, revolution, anarchists, bombers, British concentration camps ... oops, is that really a hundred years ago?!? The Mekons travel back/forward to a world unaware that it’s waiting for the pistol to CRACK CRACK CRACK in Sarajevo, plotting their singular course through the digital tsunami of contemporary sounds that blare tinnily from your mobile phone or spin at 78rpm in His Master’s Voice from the horn of your exquisite Gramophone.