Partly inspired by a pre-war visit abroad, Fortune, the latest offering by Brooklyn sextet the Mendoza Line, is a loosely knit concept album about traveling, cultural dislocation, politics, immigration and love. As concept albums go, it’s a little vague, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Most of Fortune consists of hazily sketched miniatures (“Before I Hit The Wall”, for example, seems to be about wanting a car; “Flat Feet And Western Style” about someone avoiding the draft) that are a lot less lofty, and a good deal warmer, than their subject matter might suggest.
Fortune feels oddly peppy, less weighted down by the sort of mournful ballads that populated the band’s last disc, 2002’s Lost In Revelry. While past Mendoza Line offerings have highlighted the group’s highly developed sense of misery, they don’t sound nearly as melancholic this time around, though one look at the lyric sheet proves otherwise.
Not only does the interplay between Mendoza Line frontpersons Peter Hoffman (who sounds like a cross between Neil Young and the BoDeans’ Sam Llanas), Timothy Bracy and Shannon Mary McArdle inject considerable life into the proceedings, they somehow manage to sing wildly improbable lines such as “All these visions in my head/Of what united statehood should be” without apparent awkwardness, a much harder trick.
Musically, Fortune is equally difficult to figure. Indie pop, baroque country-folk and new wave are whipped into an amiable froth that manages to simultaneously evoke X, Richard & Linda Thompson, early Wilco and Elvis Costello, while not really sounding like anything else at all. It’s both entirely novel and comfortingly familiar at the same time.