To say that history looms over Horror is just another way of saying that it’s a Mekons record. The globally scattered collective, which originally convened in Leeds, England, in the late 1970s, has long drawn lines connecting the warmongers of our time to the dominant creeps of centuries past. The first words they sing on Horror depict the departure on Christmas 1654 of the frigate Gloucester. Tasked with vanquishing Spanish control of the West Indies, the warship gave up and settled for conquering Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, pick your present villain—they all work for the same company.
Horror, released in April 2025, maneuvers in vintage Mekons fashion between the planting season of our discontent and the present, depicting lives lived in the shadow of a perpetual war economy. Always omnivorous, they hang a gang of voices upon a framework of variously hard and steady rocking tunes whose arrangements generally have a lot going on under the hood. And that’s where Horrorble comes in. As befits a crew with first-generation punk roots, the Mekons have always flashed signals of their appreciation for reggae sounds and recycling methods. So, what better thing to do to an album that starts with the subjugation of Jamaica than to feed it into the maw of dub science?
The Mekons recruited engineer/bassist Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu), a mate since the late 1980s, to do the deed. He remixed, aggressively filtered and reordered the dozen tracks on Horror into a disorienting dreamscape. Bass drums boom, isolated instrumental tracks surface and take a bow, fragmented riffs break free to careen and vibrate through gorges of echo. Cannily, however, Maimone hasn’t done the usual first dub step of stripping off all the vocals. Many of the lyrics remain, albeit swathed in effect. The Mekons have always been a wordy bunch; take that away and you remove part of the music’s heart. Instead, Maimone has matched themes to atmospheres, starting with “Before The Ice Age,” on which he sets a chilling depiction of brutality bearing down amidst impending climate catastrophe adrift in instrumental textures that have been condensed into a chilly mist.
Horrorble comes in three edition. There’s vinyl for the diehards, a download that has one additional track and a double CD that packages the original album and the dub edition together. [Fire]
—Bill Meyer
