The Mendoza Line’s by turns luminous and raging seventh album serves as bracing testimony as to how to stay human in a world assailed by bigotry and bad faith. “Accept no imitations, baby, catch a collapsing star/It’s your limitations that make you what you are,” goes the tagline of the record’s exhortatory second cut. A tuneful, if desperate, clutch at transcendence in a world that holds out scant hope of any, the track could be an outtake from the Mekons’ epochal Fear & Whiskey, right down to its contorted second guitar solo and the headlong-into-the-breach yelping that galvanizes the break.
Much of this record rings with the noisy, swinging-in-spite-of-itself authority of that boozy Mekonian dispatch from the front. The forcebeat-propelled “Golden Boy (Torture In The Sand)” is a surreal evocation of persistence in the face of cruelty, the sinister “Mysterious In Black” a pulsating tale of obsession and intrigue. “Pipe Stories”, a thinly veiled burlesque, lampoons a head of state whose blind faith and greed breed global intolerance and aggression.
The Brooklyn band plumbs everything from lethal temptations to morbid craving, all of it done up in classic postpunk, and with a mix of empathy, weariness and outrage that never gives way to resignation. Or comes across as preachy. The alternating male and female voices (Tim Bracy’s exhausted and on-edge, Shannon McArdle’s lyrical and unwavering) might at times recall those of Bob Pfeifer and Myrna Marcarian of the long lamented Human Switchboard.
Full Of Light even includes a couple of Switchboard-like takes on domesticity and its discontents. Ultimately, though, the world-historical heft of the writing here is more in keeping with that of the beaten but never quite broken Mekons. And nearly as incandescent.
