Consumer Guide Album

Jon Langford & the Men of Gwent: The Legend of LL [Country Mile, 2015]
Having mislaid my burn of this album, which I'd spun with pleasure multiple times by then, I streamed a 13-track Spotify version before gathering the gall to launch a review, a project foreordained when on April 14 I saw Langford perform for the first time in over a decade accompanied by calm, engaged old hand Sally Timms and wild, intense Texas guitar crazies the Sadies at Sony Hall on 46th Street. Without, how to say this, putting on a show, the longtime leader of the Leeds-spawned Mekons effortlessly combined John Anderson's pure country "Wild and Blue" and Eric von Schmidt's faux Caribbean "Joshua Gone Barbados" with songs of his own devising from the opening "It's Not Enough" through the turf-defining "Nashville Radio" to the climactic Mekons statement of principle "Hard to Be Human Again." What I found most engaging and indeed moving about his set was how into it he seemed--as if he was born to perform these songs and enthralled to to sing them in a Broadway nightclub half-full of old fans who are just as enthralled to be there. And this album partakes of the same kind of what I can only call magic. A-