Mekons “Wicked Midnight” Loud Music

England’s Mekons have long stood for the best sort of politicized rock. Their music is rootsy and rollicking, alternately funny, wrathful and deeply sad. As much as politics matters to them, they always have been aware that the musician’s first obligation isn’t to express an opinion but to convey a feeling.

Songwriters John Langford and Tom Greenhalgh delight in simultaneously mythologizing and deflating the band in self-referential songs that portray the Mekons as game, wittily obstreperous outcasts and misfits. It’s a band fated to oppose and born to lose--and proud of it.

The Mekons have sung about racking up losses in two important columns: rock’s commercial sweepstakes, which they view with contempt, and politics, where their socialist-left agenda has been a losing proposition through the past decade of Republican domination in the White House and Tory rule on Downing Street.

Hence it’s something of a shock to hear them open this five-song CD with “Wicked Midnight” and its ebullient chorus, which finds them -chanting: “More ways to win--I fell in love.”

Ways to win? Fell in love? So it appears that romance will be the key to redeeming the inveterate losers and turning them into winners. From the sound of “Wicked Midnight”--with its funky Mekons-play-”Mony Mony” beat--love becomes them. A second new track, “All I Want,” is a heraldic, march-tempo song of yearning and aspiration; Greenhalgh sings about waiting for some sort of unrealized fulfillment, romantic or otherwise.

The other three tracks are live recordings of previously issued songs. “The Curse” and “Amnesia” (with its impressive fiddle-and-guitar parody of the feedback-noise section of Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love”) are roughly recorded but very spirited rockers that charge ahead with punk-rock abandon. Toss in “Waltz,” a sad, weary ballad from Sally Timms, one of the most distinctive and underrated female voices in rock, and you’ve got a nice little appetizer to keep you going until the scheduled arrival next month of a new full-length album, “I Mekons.”