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Rare Punk

The Mekons - It's a rare punk band that can stay together for 25 years. Heck, it's a rare punk band that can stay together 25 weeks. The prolific Mekons, birthed in the cacophony of England's punk heyday of the mid-to-late '70s, have managed the remarkable feat of not only remaining mostly intact for nearly three decades but making relevant, consistently interesting, politically charged music all along the way.

Complete Selection of Rare Punk

Of course, the key to the band's success is that its members early on abandoned the idea of being just a punk band and instead latched on to a wide array of musical strains. On this album, the band revisits its roots, re-recording some of its earliest songs, unearthing others that never got recorded and trying to recapture the roiling mood and tumult of the time. The results, unfortunately, are more often miss than hit. Many of these long-buried and mostly forgotten songs resurface only to remind listeners why they were buried and forgotten in the first place.

"This Sporting Life" is a dreary mess, while "The Building" sounds like the noisome chant of a drunken soccer fan -- albeit one with social justice in mind. "Dan Dare" and "Never Been in a Riot" are fierce and funny exceptions, but hearing the original versions of all of these rare punk songs would have been better than hearing the band -- nearly 30 years on -- trying to re-create them. Mekons enthusiasts may be interested in the nostalgia trip, but "Junk Rock" might be a better name for this haphazard collection of what probably should have remained throwaways.

Rare Punk - Everyday Values