Track Of The Day MECANO Un-Ltd.
I don’t think many kids still play with Meccano, the educational game for the ‘little engineers of tomorrow’, regarded by many to be a parents’ ‘interested gift’ to their children to entertain themselves instead. Moreover, I have no memories first-hand, more interested in time-bending battlefields where I could deploy my squadrons of Airfix plastic soldiers, I guess they too have gone out of fashion.
On the contrary, the four decades and a half long story of the revered Amsterdam-based Post Punk band Mecano started with a surreal painting, created in 1977 by Dirk Polak, the co-founder along with guitarist Pieter Kooyman, after finding an old booklet belonging to a Meccano construction box, seems to have no end.
Originally, as many at the time, triggered by the forthright Punk impact, Mecano expanded into a five-piece, crafted, around their newly born, Polak’s co-headed DIY label Torso Records, an off-kilter poetry-laced New Wave sound, influenced by both concurrent Manchester and New York musical turmoils, until developing into a full-fledged multifaceted art collective.
Definitely to be counted, together with Minny Pops, The Ex, Flue, Kiem, and Mekanik Kommando, the first that come to mind, together with the Israeli expats Minimal Compact, on other things co-produced initially by Dirk himself, among the most significant groups of the Dutch post-punk scene of the early 80s, with three collector’s items albums spanning 1980-82.
The brand new single, “Consideration”, under the latest moniker MECANO Un-Ltd., since the band’s comeback in the 90s, is a song about humanity’s struggle with sensibility and moderation under a heavy hand of illusion.
Featuring Sin Banovic (drums, bass, synth) and Tijs Keverkamp (guitar), the song is both evocative and poignant with combinations of edgy and ethereal New-Wave moods through a vibrant concoction of steady hypnotic drum beats, sinuously humming basslines, glittering, flickering melancholy-fueled synth flows and hoarse impulses and jolts of electric guitar riffs, frame Dirk Polak‘s stern magnetic spoken words of warning alternating with angsty enlightenment and alluringly heartfelt, Bowiesque layered vocals, taking centre stage to steal your imagination.
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