Written by Sarah Mueller

My initial introduction to MESH was on the first night of Providence Popfest. I think I remember being positive about their set; alas, they had the misfortune of being directly followed by three of the best bands of the weekend in Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Good Flying Birds, and Pylon Reenactment Society, so I didn’t really have any time to sit with my thoughts. With the release of No Fun at All, I finally have the time to give MESH proper consideration, and I truly like what I hear.

From first impressions, MESH doesn’t exactly sound like someone you’d expect to play at the same festival as the Softies, Dear Nora, or Mirah, but we all know appearances can be deceiving. Maybe it’s just Allison Irwin’s 12-string guitar talking, but the more I listen to No Fun At All, the more I feel like it sounds like the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension. Not in the sense of resembling one of those jangle pop revival bands who are “stuck holding on to the past,” as Sims Hardin admonishes in the opening lines of the album, but instead dismantling the Byrds and reconstructing them into a post-punk context.

Unlike Roger McGuinn, Irwin doesn’t attempt to channel Coltrane, but she keeps the darker tone and extra bite of Fifth Dimension. Similarly, Tom Riese’s bass has a similar heat to that of Chris Hillman’s. The result isn’t psychedelic, but it maintains the pervasive sense of paranoia, which is perhaps even more fitting for this album than it was for the Byrds in 1966. While the Byrds were mostly nonspecific in that regard, sticking to generalities like “I don’t know what’s going on here”, MESH get specific on songs like “Violent Peasant” and “5G”, putting themselves into the mindsets of, respectively, a medieval nobleman and a right-wing conspiracy theorist.

No Fun At All, despite its name, manages to be an album that appeals to the part of me that likes fun indie pop just as much, if not more, than the part of me that wants serious post-punk. Beyond that, they’ve rocketed up to be one of the live shows I’d most like to see in the near future. After all, sometimes the most fun you can have is having No Fun at All.

You can listen to No Fun At All out now.