Beauty Land

Description

Greg Mendez has always been a concise songwriter. He wields restraint and simplicity as tools, the essence of his songs turning into simple, striking truths. On Beauty Land, his new album and first LP on Dead Oceans, we are guided by a narrator who is both ironic and forgiving, an outsider who has learned to reconcile cynicism with faith. These songs, imbued with humility without being self-pitying, are true altars of carefully constructed imperfection, carried by pop melodies, shimmering and incisive guitars, and a voice that aspires to the innocence of a choirboy. Most of Beauty Land was recorded directly to tape, almost entirely alone in Mendez's makeshift studio in Philadelphia (a small room with no natural light). It is his first album since the unexpected success of his self-titled album in 2023, a meteoric rise after 15 years of writing and recording in relative obscurity between Philadelphia and New York. Beauty Land picks up where we left off three years ago, exploring the depths of grief, love, and addiction, but its intense and serene clarity reveals Mendez at the peak of his craft. Some passages of Beauty Land evoke a lucid dream, battered characters making their way through a world that is both caricatured and distorted. None of the fourteen tracks exceed three minutes, but they tell stories that span lifetimes. Death looms over the album, whether it appears as a memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There is a fragility in the construction of these songs: the way the funereal organ resonates like morphine on "Looking Out Your Window," the heartbreaking simplicity of "Frog," with its slowed-down keyboard and stripped-down chorus. Beauty Land sometimes feels like an unbearable solitude. Which makes the moments when it doesn't all the more precious, such as when Mendez sings in harmony with his wife and bandmate, Veronica, towards the end of "So Mean," and it feels like a precious reunion, a brief moment of redemption.