The Mendoza Line ‎- 30 Year Low (2007)

After 10 years and eight albums, Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle, the couple who formed the core of the Mendoza Line, have split: 30 Year Low is a mini-album of new material and it's packaged with Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent, which traces their relationship through a dozen and a half covers, live tracks, alternate takes, and rarities.

This release is partly a letter of resignation, partly a grim going-away party. After 10 years and eight albums, Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle, the couple who formed the core of the Mendoza Line, have split up both romantically and creatively; Bracy gets the band in the settlement, McArdle will move on to new projects. 30 Year Low is a mini-album of new material that doesn't just match their previous efforts for countrified cynicism, but throws in tabloid helpings of sex, politics, and murder. It's packaged with Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent, which traces their relationship through a dozen and a half covers, live tracks, alternate takes, and rarities.

Owen King's liner notes compare it to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, which seems like an unfairly high standard that few artists can match. 30 Year Low is more akin to Beck's Sea Change, only less mopey. Still, the band's inner conflicts have produced some of their best work in years-- at least since Fortune. They've lost none of their political fervor, as opener "Since I Came" attests. That song, about an immigrant worker in a chicken factory, is, thank goodness, a character study rather than a screed. In general, however, 30 Year Low stays close to the break-up action, chronicling the band's age ("31 Candles") as well as what they perceive as a fruitless music career ("Stepping on My Heels"). Every song is deliciously dour, as if the band has embraced the artistic potential of failure. "It's time we rode in separate cars and stayed in our own places," McArdle sings on "Stepping on My Heels". "I'm resigned to just speak my mind and then read what's on your face."

Their caustic, candid wit-- especially in the face of such misery-- keeps 30 Year Low from sounding too self-indulgent or self-pitying. Of course McArdle can sell anything: on "Tell It to the Raven" and "31 Candles" she offsets her honeyed voice with eye-rolling phrases that constantly undermines the songs' gravity, and she's a perfect foil for Will Sheff on "Aspect of an Old Maid", which builds steadily and surely into a raucous, nasty climax. Bracy, on the other hand, still sounds a lot like Dylan, but on "I Lost My Taste" and the title track, his sadsack vocals sound like self-loathing is his default setting. As he puts it on "I Lost My Taste", "We have such terrible timing, to say nothing about taste."