:: Track Listing

1. Water Surrounds
2. Catch a Collapsing Star
3. Golden Boy (Torture in the Shed)
4. Rat's Alley
5. Settle Down, Zelda
6. Pipe Stories
7. Name Names
8. Mysterious in Black
9. Morbid Craving
10. Lethal Temptress
11. Our Love Is Like a Wire

:: Record Review

The Mendoza Line

Full of Light and Full of Fury
(Misra; 2005)

Rating: 83%


I last left The Mendoza Line at the same point that, evidently, half the band did. 2000's We're All in This Alone was a claustrophobic and spiteful record that matched the band's environs (specifically, all six members being shoved together inside one small New York City apartment some 800 miles removed from their home of Athens). The band, then comprising two couples, slogged it out with each other for over fifty minutes, resulting in a low-fi version of Rumours. The song titles gave it away: "Yoko's in the Band," "My Tattered Heart and Torn Parts," "I Hope That You Remember to Forget." Unsurprisingly, band members began to wander after its completion: promotional photos for the most recent record shows only two people.

So there's an inherent incompletion in this review, since not only am I unfamiliar of their last two records (including the Greil Marcus endorsed Fortune) but the Mendoza Line presented on Full of Light and Full of Fire is substantively different than the one in 2000. The approach in the songwriting remains pretty much the same: Bob Dylan over here, Elvis Costello there, hooks everywhere you turn, and all shot through with liberal Americana. The low-fi snarl has been completely scrubbed, though, and the result is that while the songs are crisper, they're also less immediate and emotionally wrenching. Perhaps this is a recent development; perhaps it's been like this for some time.

The thing with Full of Light though is that this is a self-proclaimed capital-S statement against the current administration and its crimes against conscience and humanity. At first glance I didn't see it: the album sounds so shiny that the listener's attention is drawn to the love songs with the big choruses, like "Catch a Collapsing Star" or "Settle Down, Zelda." True, there was the allusion to "torture in the shed" on "Golden Boy," and "Name Names" worry that "If they don't like what you think they can always read your mail," but otherwise the pail came back pretty shallow on that end.

But take a step back: the world that songwriters Timothy Bracy and Shannon McArdle present is a starkly uninviting place, filled with secrecy and mistrust, snoops and violence, blowhards and those too timid to fight back. "Water Surrounds," a title invoking both isolation and submersion, finds a character terrified to tell others what she's seen, felt and done. The sequence of events isn't really clear – is she pregnant and killing the baby? – but the loneliness is palpable in this spare song, punctuated by low guitar worthy of Luther Perkins. Suicide is clear in "The Lethal Temptress," where a battered woman exacts her revenge on a singer who "it's clear by your verse / you put America first / and all others you simply beat senseless." Even "Catch a Collapsing Star," a song otherwise concerned with heartbreak, begins with people "on the margins and divisions," and throughout is keenly aware of the narrator's shortcomings in a hard and fast world. Even "Golden Boy," a rave-up more in keeping with the material on We're All in This Alone reveals itself to be an excellent commentary on consumerism, the "torture in the shed" being the crimes hidden from the public on which its greed is largely fueled.

This begs an obvious comparison, so let's make it: Connor Oberst mused on the war and the state of New York City on 'm Wide Awake It's Morning, but mostly he was concerned with himself. Full of Light and Full of Fire is the record he might have made if he wasn't so hung up on the artist-saint myth. This may be because the Mendoza Line's creative locus is external rather than internal: their songs feature more characters and stories than recriminations, and their recriminations have a strange sense of empathy. It also may be that every song on this album is outstanding, while the best thing Oberst can muster is the Beethoven cribbing "Road to Joy." Whatever the case, this is clearly the best anti-war country(ish) record made in New York of 2005, and belatedly comes in under the radar to take its place on any top twenty list. Christopher Alexander :: 12 January 2006 |