GREG MENDEZ - Beauty Land [lp]

Greg Mendez has always been an economical songwriter – he
wields restraint and simplicity as tools, the core of his songs
sharpened into simple, cutting truths. On Beauty Land, his new
album and debut LP for Dead Oceans, we’re guided by a wry
but forgiving narrator, an underdog who has learned to balance
cynicism and faith. These songs are self-effacing without
self-pity, carefully constructed altars of imperfection channeled
through pop melodies, shimmering but urgent guitars, and a
voice that reaches for choir boy innocence.
The bulk of Beauty Land was recorded directly to tape, almost
entirely alone in Mendez’s makeshift home studio in
Philadelphia - a small room with no natural light. It’s his first full
length since his unexpected self-titled breakthrough in 2023,
which was a slow burn success following 15 years of writing and
recording music in relative obscurity between Philly and New
York. Beauty Land picks up where we left off three years ago –
plumbing the depths of grief, love, and addiction – but its
intense, quiet clarity shows Mendez at his songwriting best.
Parts of Beauty Land feel like a lucid dream, dented characters
carve their way through a world that’s cartoonish and warped –
the broken-clock march of “I Wanna Feel Pretty,” the chiming
toy piano on “Gentle Love.” “Mary / Dreaming” begins as a
sparse, finger-picked lament before cutting abruptly to a
deflated, Beach-Boys-but-make-it-fucked-up resolution that
brings both melancholy and joy; a sense that all things can be
true at once. None of the 14 tracks here break three minutes, but
they tell stories that span lifetimes.
Death floats through the record, whether it appears as a
memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There’s a
fragility to how these songs are built: the way the funeral organ
hits alongside the morphine on “Looking Out Your Window,” the
devastating simplicity of “Frog,” with its slowed-down keyboard
and bare refrain: “Please forgive me for my faults.” Beauty Land
feels, at times, impossibly lonely. Which makes it really count
when it doesn’t – like when Mendez sings in harmony with his
wife and bandmate, Veronica near the end of “So Mean” and it
feels like a cherished reunion, a fleeting moment of redemption,
a temporary parting of the seas.

Vinyl release of Greg Mendez - Beauty Land [lp]. Released through DEAD OCEANS and available on LP.