Across our travels with him throughout Beauty Land, Greg Mendez goes to work at the bar, gets mugged while walking home in middle of the night, has his heart broken more than once, breaks up with some bad friends, ends up with a concussion, is probably a bigger disappointment to himself than the people around him.

This is to say that the relatively brisk sophomore effort (and first full-length since joining Dead Oceans) from the Philly indie rock songwriter is as accidentally emo as it gets, which in his short-form styling of (mostly) unplugged melancholia makes for a perfectly complimentary peer-to-peer evaluation when sitting across from someone like Joyce Manor’s Barry Johnson.

Whereas Gen X had Elliott Smith and millennials got Bright Eyes, it makes sense that in our current timeline convergence of late ’90s and 2000s nostalgia, Mendez’s bleak, deprecating pen adorned with nothing but the bare bones in his cherubic hymnal voice, cozily soft, gentle acoustic strums, the warm hum of keys, and a lackadaisical drum and bassline very much make a complex set of emotions sound simply beautiful in the darkest hours of the night.

Highlights: “Gentle Love”, “No Evil”, “Geranium”

Greg Mendez’ Beauty Land is available now on Dead Oceans.

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