Shannon McArdle and Timothy Bracy, the heart of the Mendoza Line, have split, and this is their Shoot Out The Lights — or so the promo copy and liner notes would argue. It’s a rather unseemly if inevitable publicity card to play. This scathing eight-song collection didn’t need it. For all the ugly images and daggered lines, it’s the band’s most listenable and accomplished work.
“My soul is leaving me, my heart is hiding in his grave,” sings McArdle on the quiet but fierce opener “Since I Came”. She sounds like she knows the truth. On “Aspect Of An Old Maid”, Bracy imagines the face of the mother of his child and realizes that he hates himself for what he’s becoming and what he thinks he sees.
The album mixes country-folk amateurism and noisy Velvet Underground rock, the ballads illuminating the rockers and vice versa. Recrimination is as rock ‘n’ roll as Chuck Berry, and the beaten-down bitterness still vibrates with life. “I could think of nothing so terrible as to no longer be your lover and only be your friend,” Bracy sings in that blatant Dylan drawl. He feels it, she feels it, we’ve all felt it.
The odds-and-sods bonus disc collects some Cole Porter, Dylan, Springsteen and Thompson covers, lo-fi live cuts, and demos of earlier tunes. Under an odd conception of honesty, the Mendoza Line has always released just about anything, regardless of how it sounds. This second disc follows that aesthetic. The first pursues and finalizes a different honesty altogether.