The tumbling "Rock and Roll," a 1989 radio-ready attack on the rock business, should have been their "Nevermind." Their first record on a U.S. major label and one of their best, it's the type of ain't-broke hard rock periodically fixed and sold as new. (On Saturday, Langford cracked, "The Strrokes. I like their earrly stuff.") The beautiful, quavering voice of Timms turned up on "Rock and Roll" to complement Langford's exhausted shout and Greenhalgh's without-a-net imploring (uniquely and bizarrely suited to lines that don't scan). In "Empire of the Senseless" Greenhalgh taunts censors that "this song promotes homosexuality/ It's in a pretend family relationship with the others on this record/ And on the charts and on the radio." But the song never did crash those bigger parties; it sold about 23,000 copies in the U.S., and A&M dropped them.

That was the closest they got to Mekons livelihood. They've scraped by with part-time jobs, government and spousal assistance, and other music gigs and scattered to Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco and Leeds. Part of the pleasure of a Mekons show is the reunion of old friends, both in the crowd and onstage. Before Friday's show, Timms explained their un-American version of success: "We have longevity because we've never thought it was about money."

The core Mekons are the same now as in the mid-1980s: Langford, Greenhalgh, Timms, Bell, bass player Sarah Corina, drummer Steve Goulding, violinist Susie Honeyman and guitarist/oudist/cumbusist Lu Edmonds. (Edmonds split before New York to play on Billy Bragg's tour; Honeyman was replaced for this tour by Jessica Billey.) Over the nine albums since "Rock and Roll," they've collaborated with novelist Kathy Acker on an opera about horny female pirates in 1996; made a techno concept album about porn and advertising in 1998; and descended into the subdued gloom of crumbling cities in 2000's "Journey to the End of the Night."

The darkness is relieved by a chunky dub rhythm here, a startling shout by "deputy" Neko Case there, but there's little cheer in "Journey's" bleak soundscapes, its scratchily recorded autoharp and self-loathing lyrics -- it sounds like the empty parking lot after Tom Waits' circus has pulled out. The old outrage is there in "Last Night on Earth," but also a new hopelessness: "Robber barons roam/ Collecting their debts and filling up death row," but "they can't hurt you now/ Last night on earth."

It's a midlife crisis album, and it beat me to it by about a year. I turned 40 a few months after the planes hit, and I'm still waiting to snap back or maybe forward into the next chapter. I don't know if the darkness and doubt following me about is standard-issue middle-of-life dark woods, brain-chemical spill, or an appropriate response to these times we live in. Swagger isn't inspiring anymore, but some of 40's questions remind me of 15's: What does a person hang onto? When is resistance to the way things are integrity and when is it time to grow up out of that? As the rich get richer and the hatreds more bloodthirsty, belief in political progress can look as dreamy as religion.

And, lo, unto the confusion of 2002, the Mekons deliver a gospel album for unbelievers. They croon hymns of religious paradox and shout apocalyptic warnings like mad friars in Sherwood Forest. The relationship to the good fight, and of rebellion to resignation, is muddled. On "Hate Is the New Love," Sally Timms sings with incomprehensible clarity, "There's no peace/ On this terrible shore/ Every day is a battle/ How we still love the war." The words warn of "dangerous bibles" and exhort to "Take His Name in Vain," but the old forms still comfort -- unison singing and swaying rhythms and lullaby violin.

I congratulated Tom Greenhalgh on making the best Sept. 11 response album. "We've been getting that quite a lot," he said gently, "but the songs were all written by March 2001." "OOOH!" was actually inspired by records of Appalachian church-singing and books about William Blake and William Morris and radical Christian sects like the Muggletonians and the Levellers, leftist church history that Greenhalgh and Langford say, darkly, "has been covered up."

The Mekons were tired by Saturday, but they still let me tag along to the homey gathering in the Mercury Lounge dressing room, where wives and friends and Mekons compared childbirth stories. Asked why atheists would make such a religious album, Langford said, "When you look around the world and you can't find any meaning, you look at more things." (He added in an e-mail, "Socialism in England came from the Bible more than 'Das Kapital' and is possibly better and richer for it.") But still, it's Christianity. Is he seeking what religion offers without, say, Christ? "Absolutely," Langford declared, hastily adding, "but not like a hippie or anything going off to search."

Another struggle for those of us who came of age during punk: balancing the pride in our edge against the nagging sense that love and hope probably will take us closer to where we want to go. That tension dissolves for a happy moment in the music on Saturday during the bouncy reggae "Tina" from "Journey to the End of the Night." Fans of several generations are dancing side by side, and Langford's singing with his eyes closed. "And I want nothing/ It's what I'm trained to believe in/ But I can still dream of things/ That have never been" and then a line that veers dangerously close to hippie, yet feels earned, maybe even tenable after 25 years of small-label soldiering: "But someday will be."

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