Jon Langford – All The Fame Of Lofty Deeds

The hardest working man in show business? That’s easy: Jon Langford. Since 1998, he’s been the key man on more than a dozen albums with the Sadies, Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Waco Brothers, Sally Timms, and perhaps first among equals, the Mekons, the infinitely evolving, organically changing entity that sprouted from the first wave of British punk in Leeds in 1977.

Common to all of Langford’s prolificacy is his dart-aim with increasing accuracy at the junction where art, intellect, politics and fun meet. That he succeeds so convincingly on his first two albums of 2004 is not just reason to cheer, but reason to suggest the singer/writer/musician/painter for a MacArthur Fellows grant.

All The Fame Of Lofty Deeds, credited as a Langford solo album, shares some texture with last year’s Mayors Of The Moon by Langford & His Sadies. For me, Mayors generated deeper, richer emotional resonances than any of his previous work. Lofty Deeds comes close. With typical erudition, the title comes from Andreas Gryphils’ 17th-century poem “All Is Vanity”: “The fame of lofty deeds vanish like a dream.”

On this song-cycle, Lofty Deeds is a character, a country music archetype whose story of “drink and pills and Nashville Radio” is the Hank/Elvis rocket arc from poverty to glory to a premature funeral train.

A confident country and midwestern sound runs through Lofty Deeds, as in many of Langford’s now-Chicago-based projects combining rural instrumentation and urban grit. Frequent sidekick Jon Rice adds dobro, mandolin and guitar, and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts turn up on two tracks, but foremost is Langford’s full-throated Welsh-accented singing.

Langford stays in character on upbeat ravers such as “Hard Times” and “Over The Cliff”, but he seems to be speaking from the outside on “Sputnik 57”, which connects the space program to American imperialism, and “The Country Is Young”, a cultural critique in which he plays sentimental good cop to DeTocqueville’s bad cop.

There are two covers. The 1927 classic “Trouble In Mind”, the template here from Bob Wills, offers an appropriate valedictory, while Procol Harum’s “Homburg” is a deliciously left-field but logical treat.

Enriching the mix on tracks such as “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, Langford seems to be plucking a mbira, the Zimbabwean metal-strips-inside-a-gourd finger piano, which is also listed as one of his instruments on the Mekons’ new album. Punk Rock is a new collection of old songs (circa 1977-81) the Mekons dusted off for their recent 25th anniversary concerts. Once performed with “rank amateurishness,” as Trouser Press put it, these songs now benefit from the Mekons informal skillfulness.

Drummer Stephen Goulding, a great player even before he anchored Graham Parker’s Rumour, gives a steady backbone for Langford and Mekons co-founder Tom Greenhalgh to rant on noteworthy artifacts such as “Never Been In A Riot”, as they keep shouting for social justice and against hypocrisy. The demands need to be made now as much as they did all those years ago, and Langford and company still have the sense to make them — not on behalf of any Party, but as an invitation to a party.