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30 Year Low + The Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent

by

The Mendoza Line

 
30 Year Low + The Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent

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Avg: 4.0 (65 ratings)

The sound of a relationship dissolving, one note at a time.

  • We Say...

    Review by Tizzy Asher

    Divorce hurts. You can hear it cracking Shannon McArdle’s voice as she sings, “It’s time we rode in a separate car, stayed in our own place” during “Stepping on My Heels,” on 30 Year Low. Whether or not it’s what she intends, McArdle is announcing the dissolution of both the romantic and artistic partnership between her and Mendoza Line guitarist Timothy Bracy.

    Many songwriters have recorded “divorce albums” — Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love are two famous examples — but it’s one thing to write about your heartbreak, and another to do so while staring into the eyes of the person who caused it. Only Richard and Linda Thompson (the quintessential Shoot Out the Lights) have ventured into the brave and emotionally naked territory that Bracy and McArdle explore.

    Musically, 30 Year Low is a brief whirlwind of an album. Its eight tracks blitz through languid country shuffles, dreamy piano-fueled reveries and rousing beer-raising anthems. The instrumentation is tight and solid: guitars, lap steel, pounding drums. What ties the songs together is regret. It seeps through both Bracy and McArdle’s voices, giving them a weary tone. Even songs that are ostensibly about political issues, such as “Since I Came,” McArdle’s moving epic about the state of undocumented immigrant workers in Georgia, highlight the heartbreak.

    Accentuating this sense of isolation is the fact that McArdle and Bracy rarely sing together. For the vitriolic duet “Aspect of an Old Maid,” Okkervil River’s Will Sheff steps in to sing the male lead. (An alternate version with Bracy singing the lead exists: the group’s label Glurp posted it on its Web site.) For “Stepping on My Heels,” and the rocking “31 Candles” McArdle’s vocals are doubled for harmony.

    When 30 Year Low was first announced, rumors circulated that Bracy would continue Mendoza Line without McArdle. Since that time, Bracy has wisely reconsidered. Though McArdle didn’t join the Mendoza Line until 1998, three years after its formation, she steadied its rock with her languid vocals and meditative songwriting. Continuing the band without her would been like sticking around the apartment you once shared happily with a long-gone lover: even if you stripped the carpet and reupholstered the furniture, you wouldn’t be able to shake that sense of loss. As much as it hurts, the Mendoza Line needs to rest. 30 Year Low is the moving van that carts them into the sunset.

  • They Say...

    Review by Andy Whitman, All Music Guide

    Brooklyn's the Mendoza Line have been poised at the brink of a precipice throughout their ten-year existence. 2000's masterful We're All in This Alone was a thrust and parry exchange between the principal combatants, husband and wife Timothy Bracy and Shannon McArdle, and the band's last effort, 2005's Full of Light and Full of Fire, seemed to foreshadow relational failure with a fatalistic shrug. So it should come as no great surprise that with 30 Year Low, the husband-and-wife duo, and the existence of the band itself, go hurtling over the edge of the cliff. Divorce albums, of course, have always constituted their own hypercharged subgenre, with Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Richard & Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights at the head of the sadsack class. You can slot 30 Year Low just slightly below those masterpieces. While Bracy tends to couch his sorrow and self-loathing in poetic sentiments and alt country rambles, McArdle goes straight for the rock & roll jugular, and the contrasting styles create the tension that fuels this album. Bracy's Dylanesque rasp chronicles the dissolution of the couples' marriage on the disquieting ballad "Love on Parole," while the title track finds him employing an extended marriage-as-stock-market metaphor on a Bakersfield lope that could have originated with Merle Haggard or Buck Owens. Only his "I've Lost My Taste," which verges on mush-mouthed Dylan parody, fails to connect. If anything, McArdle is even more of a revelation. "Stepping on My Heels" is a lovely, disquieting meditation on aging and the chew 'em up and spit 'em out nature of the music industry. And "31 Candles" is a great, raging mess of snarling guitars, snarky commentary, and bitterness and recrimination, a cathartic middle finger to a marriage that was, and is no more. It's clear evidence that these folks won't be making music together anytime soon. And that's a shame. Aside from the relational crash and burn, which is reason enough to mourn, it's abundantly clear that we've lost a very talented band. The accompanying odds & sods collection, Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent, will probably be of interest only to hardcore fans and completists. Compiling B-sides, live versions of previously released studio tracks, a few choice covers (Linda Thompson's exquisite "Withered and Died," Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher Than the Rest"), and the kind of flaccid studio noodling that should have never seen the light of day, it's the perfect argument for the "Next" button on your CD player or iPod. The real action here is on 30 Year Low, and it's fast and most decidedly furious. Like the best divorce albums, it offers sadness, pathos, and the electric thrill of great music forged in the crucible of pain.

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