The Mendoza Line.

Recordings

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Love songs come and go, but a good breakup song will jam its fist into your chest and squeeze the life right outta you. The Mendoza Line's 30 Year Low mini-album offers eight songs so gut-wrenchingly personal you can't help but be swept up in the bitter heartsickness. 30 Year Low is a crowded, brutal, witty, authentic, vigorous mess of history and hurt feelings, a vivid and contradictory document of life at the edge of 30, and the death of love for two beaten-down and tangled-up souls.

Released along with the mini-album is a bonus disc, The Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent, a warts-and-all omnibus culled from live tracks, radio programs, rehearsal takes, covers, and demos.

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Recalling in equal measure the passion and soul of early Pretenders, the wrecked majesty of Harry Nilsson's Pussycats album and the humor and indignation of the great Mekons, The Mendoza Line's Full of Light and Full of Fire is a startling meditation on the abuse of power and those who are left in its wake: the spiritually and economically disenfranchised, the isolated and ruined, those who are lost or are simply trying to disappear.

Moral bigots and moneyed self-interests have now, by means of subterfuge, sleight of hand and sheer brute force, begun the process of inextricably changing the meaning and motives of that place the Mendoza Line calls home. The Mendoza Line in turn offers this resounding valedictory summation of the themes of avarice, lust, lechery, ethical and spiritual corruption which have long consumed them. This is the second Valley Forge. Full of Light and Full of Fire is something to keep warm by.

“Full of Light and Full of Fire is easily one of the best albums of the decade. … Like Born to Run, Pleased to Meet Me, and Being There, Full of Light and Full of Fire is another page in American mythology, an artifact of the withered dreams and fallen hopes of the dispossessed.” —PopMatters

“The seventh album from this Brooklyn-via-Georgia quintet transmits wizened poetry and rec-room intimacy with Music Row-worthy craft. … [T]hough the band seems sure the world is going to hell in a handbasket, gorgeous slow-burners recognize that complicated love is better than no love at all.” —Rolling Stone

“Sly epics that strip Americana music of its recent purist veneer and put the mess back into it … political without preaching, sexy in a bookish way.” —Blender

“Full of Light and Full of Fire contains the prettiest protest songs imaginable.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Their sparkling wit and dynamic approach to songwriting sets them in the higher echelons of the music world. … The truth is, it seems as if the Mendoza Line has no limitations.” —Treble

“The world is a ghetto, and this time, the Mendoza Line is ghetto-fabulous… these songs are too beaten and maybe too smart to protest, but too pissed to do nothing.” —Dusted

“Shannon McArdle and Timothy Bracy are adept at presenting heavy topics with a light hand… the lyrics are subtle and poignant, with as much emphasis on storytelling as dissent.” —Pitchfork

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Fortune features an astonishing series of detailed narratives, some told from the point of view of Americans traveling abroad in 2003, and others from the perspective of recent immigrants to the United States. Interspersed with biting cultural commentary and (of course) a little romance, the resulting work is inspiring and intoxicating and a little exotic, perhaps a folk music analogue to the great Ernest Hemingway expatriate novels of the late 1920's. Like other great albums that deftly intertwine the topical with the interpersonal (Infidels, Armed Forces, Squeezing Out Sparks), Fortune renders its serious thematic content with buoyant good humor and infectious tunefulness, underscoring the peculiar alchemy which makes the Mendoza Line both funnier and much more poignant than all but a very few of their contemporaries in the folk and pop genres.

four stars “Their most confident sounding release. Few bands can make desperation sound so all-embracing and enticing.” —Mojo

four stars “The constant shifts in perspective aren't distracting, they're divine.” —Blender

“Indie pop, baroque country-folk and new wave are whipped into an amiable froth that manages to simultaneously evoke X, Richard and Linda Thompson, early Wilco and Elvis Costello… entirely novel and comfortingly familiar at the same time.” —No Depression

“Whatever impact they might make almost seems secondary to the fact that they're doing what they're doing at all… the songs here are wonderful, sad, funny things, poking around in our fears and loves and seeing what they can find.” —Dusted

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“There is the sweetness of Brinsley Schwarz; there is the doubting undertow of Richard and Linda Thompson. The sound of people in love with each other and not trusting each other... you could be listening to the Mekons, if the Mekons had come out of the USA... For people who named themselves for the batting average beneath which one sinks into oblivion to become one with, as Dostoevski put it in ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ ‘those God forgets’ (i.e., .200), they are beginning again from the beginning; the heartland may be wherever they happen to be playing tonight.” —Greil Marcus, salon.com

“The most likable record of the year, a toothpick Blonde On Blonde held together with chewing gum.” —Village Voice

Best of 2002 —Magnet, Uncut

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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the summer of 1996 and the Mendoza Line were living in Athens, Ga., attempting to compile their debut album - and wondering if they might just break up in the process. It is now seven years later and the Mendoza Line are still together, but that much labored-over album never came out, at least not in the way the band intended. Until now, that is. If They Knew This Was the End is the missing link that no one was exactly looking for, but that everyone will be glad they found.

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