Greg Mendez with Scarlet Rae and State Birds

$18 advance
$22 day of show
$2 off for SPACE
The Philadelphia-base songwriter channels pop melodies, urgent guitars, and a “Beach Boys-but-make-it-fucked-up” sense of melancholic joy in his SPACE debut.
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.
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Scarlet Rae — a Los Angeles-born, New York City-based artist — started to unveil solo tracks in 2020. She quickly honed a formula that blends understated acoustic instrumentation with shoegaze gloom and whispery, effect-shrouded vocals. For those uninitiated, her lowkey output may have seemed to come from nowhere. But she was already a seasoned musician, having performed in a myriad projects since her teens. Rae comes from a family of kindred spirits, who encouraged her to learn guitar as a young child. This led her to open for her father at bars around Los Angeles and attend concerts with her older sister. By high school, she was fronting the indie folk band Rose Dorn, who became favorites in the Los Angeles DIY circuit. The trio’s sepia tinted debut, Days You Were Leaving, was issued by Bar None Records in 2019.