The Mendoza Line - We're All In This Alone (2000/2020)

While lacing cheery melodies with poisonous lyrics has long been a successful pop music formula, it takes a particular breed of musician to elevate the juxtaposition to an art form all its own. Elvis Costello and the Smiths would probably be the best-known practitioners of this craft-- I'd even go as far as to establish a new microgenre of pessimistic pop. The likes of Quasi, Elliott Smith, and Magnetic Fields would easily make the list. Of course, given such lofty company, you couldn't expect the Mendoza Line to stand out in the crowd, but as also-rans go, you could do much, much worse; over the course of two full-lengths and two EPs, they've proven themselves as a band beholden of an uncanny songwriting intelligence, impressive lyrical aptitude, and the most defeatist attitude since Archers of Loaf imploded.

On We're All in This Alone, the Mendoza Line makes a tremendous effort to implode as well. With its sloppy production, half-finished packaging, and comically hyperliterate liner notes detailing the band's many (fictionalized, or at least hyperbolized) interpersonal conflicts, the album reeks of studied underachievement. The sneering woman on the cover-- looking bored, drunk or both-- is the perfect visual analog to the album. The songs are still textbook Mendoza Line-- a mixture of buzzy indie-pop and slow-paced, country-tinged ballads-- but they sound as if the band banged them all out in half an afternoon, as if they couldn't wait to get back to moping around the around the house and bickering passive-aggressively with each other.

But while the band attempts to come off as characters in a Neil LaBute play, they end up hitting closer to the High Fidelity mark; at heart, they're just overeducated music geeks most comfortable with expressing themselves through their songs. However hard they try to intentionally annoy-- be it with the 20-second digital hiccup that kicks off We're All in This Alone, their collective trademark style of penning astoundingly bitter lyrics like, "Strategizing over lunch, the worst starfucker in the bunch/ Your eye for talent never yielded much/ Hey, it pains me watching you compete/ At the slut fair down on Barber Street/ But if you feel it makes your life complete, good luck"-- there's a tenderness and a pathos at the core of the band that elicits empathy. "Idiot Heart" is a prime example: starting off as Neutral Milk Hotel- esque fuzz-bash-pop with Margaret Maurice's detuned, bored vocals detailing a "daily production of idiot hearts," the song splits itself in half by the end, exposing its saddened, empty insides as Maurice slowly croons, "I am lost and the only way to find my way is to lose my way."