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Album Review
by SashaS Vinyl
6-1-2003
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| The Mendoza Line's 'Lost In Revelry' |
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The Mendoza Line: 'Lost In Revelry'
(Cooking Vinyl)
Rewind #4: The Mendoza Line are emo-tripping with a twist
In the six years since emerging from the Athens, Georgia, The Mendoza Line have averaged an album every 18 months. ‘Lost In Revelry’ is the forth instalment in a series of discs that know to be beautiful, weird, tragic, uplifting, ballady, rocking, folky, poppy… This is like an encyclopaedia of styles that doesn’t shy away from attempting to better the inspirations.
‘Lost In Revelry’ features their finest collection of songs to date, and sees Peter Hoffman (gtr, vox) and Timothy Bracy (gtr, vox, keys) elevating their songwriting to near stratospheric proportions. From the Stonesy shuffle and swagger of ‘Damn Good Disguise’, the cheerfully malevolent Richard and Linda (Thompson) bounce of ‘Whatever Happened To You?’, the soaring slow build of ‘Under Radar’ or the Watergate referencing mea-culpa ‘Mistakes Were Made’, the album provides a humorous, anxious and insightful gaze into the fast-fading glamour of independence. On her five compositions, Shannon Mary McArdle (grt, vox) establishes herself as an astonishing songwriting talent for a new generation, exercising her long-held Phil Spector fixation on ‘Somethin’ Dark’ and channelling her beloved McGarrigle Sisters on the harrowing, gospel tinged closing track ‘The Way Of The Weak’.
A loose collective of companions, in Athens, 1996, share a common love of classic songwriters, such as Dylan, Costello and Richard Thompson, are working on distilling these influences into a sound falling somewhere between those of the two greatest pop bands of their formative years - American Music Club and The Replacements. This collective - Hoffman, Bracy, Paul Deppler (bs), plus Margaret Maurice and Lori Carrier (since departed/replaced) - become The Mendoza Line, and were joined in 1998 by McArdle, a girl with an outstanding working knowledge of the folk/country tradition, and a strong affection for the songs of the Brill Building and Roy Orbison. (Drummer is Sean Fogerty.)
Releasing two albums on the Kindercore label (‘Poems To A Pawnshop’ and ‘I Like You When You Are Not Around’), the band leave the nurturing surroundings of Athens for the mean streets of Brooklyn. A third album, ‘We’re All In This Alone’, released in 2000 on Bar None records, is promptly followed by the departure of founding member (and Bracy’s long-time romantic companion) Margaret Maurice, who wishes to concentrate her efforts on painting.
Some words from the band: “We hope you will enjoy this record, into which we have poured every last drop of our emotional and fiscal resources; and that the diversity of writing and recording styles it contains will appeal to more than one side of the listener - masculine and feminine, pretentious and shallow, thoughtful and appetitive, rebellious and subservient; if it doesn’t, if it confuses you instead, appearing undecided and desultory, we really regret it, and express the milder wish that we have at least not insulted your sense of dignity, honesty and taste.”
Far from it; The Mendoza Line’s disc is full of music that leads you via the lost highway to the Pizza Bell at the end of the universe or just a reality’s reflection that chronicles its time, place or circumstances? These are stories from the city: hum of traffic, wailing emergency sirens, empty bottles on the floor mirroring images of unwatched TV-set, stale smoke… and ‘Lost In Revelry’ on repeat for sub consciousness to enjoy radiance.
8/10
SashaS Vinyl
6-1-2003
The Mendoza Line’s album ‘Lost In Revelry’ was released on 30 September 2002 via Cooking Vinyl
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