Whores, trains and scrap metal

Last year's 30 Year Low by the Mendoza Line was one of rock and roll's great divorce albums, right up there with Shoot out the Lights. (I don't actually know any other divorce albums, do you?) Shannon McArdle wrote most of the best songs for the album, spitting mad, funny songs about an under-30 rival who "wore a kittie on her shirt", among others, and she's back now with a much more subdued, sort of disturbing post-divorce album, reviewed in today's PW.

Shannon McArdle
Summer of the Whore (Bar None)

Rating: Solid, like the Liberty Bell.

After the divorce chronicled by Mendoza Line’s 30 Year Low, newly solo Shannon McArdle tries out all the break-up recovery strategies: revenge fantasies, self-pity and rebound sex. Still, when McArdle murmurs, “You can have me in the back of your car/You can have me anywhere” in the title cut, it doesn’t sound like she expects to enjoy it much. There’s a remove to these songs—even “He Was Gone” about a lost baby—like strong feelings filtered through thick glass, or maybe antidepressants. An incisive lyricist, McArdle gets post-relationship inertia exactly right. Problem is, nobody really wants to go there. (Jennifer Kelly)



A taste, though probably not good for you..."Poison My Cup"

This is fun, too, and not just because it's Project Jenny Project Jan (almost by definition a work in progress). They're backed by So Percussion, the avant-drumming outfit that recently charged $50 a ticket to people who wanted to watch them bang on scrap metal while riding a train from Brattleboro to Bellows Falls. Conceptually, interesting, but damn, hard on the wallet...

Anyway, onward here's the song, which is called "You Said"