Mendoza Line Issue #33

30 Year Low (Glurp)

By Chris Pacifico
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Breaking up is hard to do, but it never sounded as beautiful as it does on the Mendoza Line’s 30 Year Low. The album officially proclaims the end of band members Shannon McArdle and Timothy Bracy’s marriage as well as their artistic collaboration as the former is ventures on to pursue other projects. Whereas some couples end their marriages in ugly and stretched out divorce proceedings, these two have made a double-disc album rife with brokenhearted Americana, full of yearning and drizzling with melancholy, though a ray of light at the end of the tunnel seeps its way in.

“Since I Came” comes right from a late night truck stop in the middle of nowhere where the brokenhearted gather, but the story is told from the standpoint of an overcome immigrant worker from one of Georgia’s chicken factories. “31 Candles” is a rustic, roadhouse-laced ditty of country power-pop; while McArdle’s mesquite and honey-coated voice always evokes the proper ladylike etiquette of a traditional Southern belle, it’s welcoming to hear her spit out lines of piss and vinegar like “C’mon over honey / Grab your pens and get your shit / She’s drawing blueprints / Layin’ marble / Build a shrine around your dick.” The bouncing harmonies are delivered in an eloquent tit-for-tat fashion between McArdle’s coo and Bracy’s raspy Dylan-like drawl.

Disc 2, titled Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent, is a collection of a few live numbers and mostly covers of legendary breakup songs like Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” with the tonality of both a shit-kicking campfire sing-along and a pub chantey. Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” has a baroque pop twist à la Muswell Hillbillies–era Kinks and Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest”; it is by and far the most deeply felt dose of lonesome and sadness that helps make 30 Year Low one of the Mendoza Line’s career all-time highs.