Glurp Records
2007
Final Reflections Of The Legendary Malcontent
About This Album
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.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,2,4,5,6 and 17)

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