The Mendoza Line
Issue #26
Full of Light and Full of Fire (Misra)
By Kristina Francisco
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 12:19pm
If there’s ever been a line that so perfectly summed up the tossed-off, casual genius of the Mendoza Line, it’s the surprisingly poignant Timothy Bracy-delivered “It’s our limitations that make us what we are” on the slow-motion torch anthem, “Catch a Collapsing Star,” the second song of the Mendoza Line’s fourth and finest album, the superb Full of Light and Full of Fire.
Once lazy and intractable, the Mendoza Line’s newest ebbs along at a brisker pace. It’s also the band’s most intensely personal album to date, kicking off with the doleful “Water Surrounds,” which finds Shannon McArdle confessing forlornly, “I’m bored to tears with my novel and this music,” sounding like an especially world-weary Loretta Lynn.
The torrid Replacements-fervor of Bracy’s “Name Names” is blistering, while the taut, Tom Verlaine-like guitar weave of “Mysterious In Black” dazzles, nicely framing McArdle’s pained admonition of “I’m going to put the screws on you / Won’t stop until they’ve gone straight through.”
There are no hidden treatises or innuendo here, just an album of love and fear: love of intimacy and beauty and the creation of art, and fear of a world where those things are being stripped away on a daily basis, scattering like frightened birds. The Mendoza Line revel in tattered, awkward gestures delivered clumsily from the band’s far corner of the world, and it’s hard not to stand awestruck at the poignancy and beauty attendant in it.
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