Written by How much feeling can fit inside a Greg Mendez song? On “Frog,” from his new album, Beauty Land, he shows us. Here is every word he sings in it: “Please forgive me for my faults.” His voice never rises above a hum. It’s over in 73 seconds, but I haven’t felt so harrowed by 73 consecutive seconds of music all year.
How much life and detail can fit inside a Greg Mendez song? “I pretend your garden’s full of flowers every morning/They forgive me for the things I’ve done and the things I will become when I’m angry,” he begins on “Sunsick”—within the space of one breath, he’s situated us in a haunted landscape, a house, while Mendez unpacks the groceries, looks around, and realizes there is “no one else I have to blame” for this massive, human-sized loss. He sits alone, absorbing the hammer blow of his guilt and his total alienation within it. (That one maxes out the clock at 145 seconds.)
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Mendez has been writing these types of songs—so plainspoken and open-hearted you fear for their safety—for over 15 years now. Beauty Land is his debut since signing to Dead Oceans, but Mendez has altered nothing about his approach nor availed himself of any new resources to make it, because his music requires nothing he doesn’t already have. He records everything alone, as he always has, and his songs cast their frightened shadows against your mind’s eye, scurrying away into the deeper folds of your subconscious when you turn to look at them.
Maybe the room in West Philadelphia he recorded Beauty Land has better acoustics than your average bedroom, or maybe he just fussed a little longer with his set-up, but Beauty Land sounds just a bit sharper than Mendez’s usual. The toy piano plinks on “I Wanna Feel Pretty” and “No Evil” ring out with a steeliness that gives Beauty Land a starker profile than his previous records, as if there were late afternoon shadows framing every rough-handed strum and blot of keyboards. The difference is subtle, but it’s unmistakable.
It’s just as unmistakable who that profile reminds us of, and it’s probably Mendez’s curse that he can’t weather a single review without someone invoking the name of Elliott Smith. And yet, he seems to be leaning into the spiritual link on Beauty Land, even encouraging it. Mendez’s guitar has never so closely resembled the feathery Le Domino guitar that Smith immortalized on his early Kill Rock Stars albums, and there are moments when the sonic resemblance grows so startling that it prompts a hey-wait-a-minute. I had a hey-wait-a-minute happen to me at the outset of “Gentle Love,” another on “Looking Out Your Window,” both of which not only replicate the sound of Either/Or and Elliott Smith but seemingly bottle its air.
Although Mendez might live inside the world Smith created, he sees his environs differently. Smith’s songs often radiated cold anger at the “you’s” he sang to, while Mendez’s songs are full of “you’s” who he can’t help identifying with. “You’re sincerely upset, so I ask what you want/But the late night stores don’t keep it stocked,” he sang on 2023’s “Cop Caller,” with the empathy of someone who has navigated broken nervous systems his whole life, his own and others’. It’s a role he plays a few different times on Beauty Land, notably on “Concussion,” where he ruminates miserably on “kicking a bad friend out.” It seemed like the right thing to do, and yet why does he feel so awful about it?
As he has for years, Mendez maps the dips and crags of addiction so plainly that to comment on his lyrics feels like standing in their way. On “I Wanna Feel Pretty,” he spends New Year’s Eve alone, depressed and drinking “’til I couldn’t remember my name.” He checks himself into rehab, and then (seemingly) escapes, flush with an exhilaration that is only punctured by “the gleam in my eye where I see/The places I would be if I wasn’t me.” Read that line again, and ask yourself—where does Mendez bury the tripwire? Where, exactly, does his gasp of freedom double back on itself, turn into a sob of despair?
You can’t really, because Mendez’s craft is so light that it disappears, absorbs itself into the bones of the music. “Geranium,” a late highlight on an album that could level you within half a lunch break, gave me difficulty breathing the first time I heard it. One of Mendez’s friends exits the clinic only to start “using” again. The friend calls Mendez, making up stories about fights, a broken nose. They break down crying on the phone. They swear they’re trying; they really need that 20 bucks. Mendez holds the line. He repeats to the friend he loves them. The friend rebuffs him. The song ends on a pledge as provisional as it is devotional: “I wouldn’t hang up/I couldn’t.” Mendez’s singing glows with the heat of someone who understands just how small they are—the promises you need to make to keep living.
