Greg Mendez - First Time / Alone [7" Vinyl]

Dead Oceans

£15.28

Format: 7” Vinyl
Catalogue No.: DOC372LP
Barcode: 0656605167213
Release Date: 06 Dec 2024
Genre: Indie/Alternative

 ‘First Time’ / ‘Alone’, Greg Mendez’s new EP and first release with Dead Oceans, came together in late Summer and early Autumn of 2023; the songs here appear in the order in which they were written, recorded straight to four-track in the small spare room of his West Philadelphia apartment.
 It’s a four-song arc, a spectral passageway, one brief and fluid body of work that hangs together from the mournful opening of ‘Mountain Dew Hell’ to the pitched-up vocals on ‘Pain Meds’, a tiny song floundering in the enormity of grief.
 The experience of listening through is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York Autumn with grey skies and naked trees. But while the release is sparse and spontaneous, it’s tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song.
 ‘First Time’ / ‘Alone’ is the inverse of his 2023 self-titled album, a meticulous and laboured-over collection of songs that went on to become a surprise slowburn success.
 Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but the self-titled was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on Best Of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste and more. That forward momentum came to a quick halt following an intensive surgery on his right wrist in the Summer of 2023 - a four-month purgatory of bad TV, cancelled touring and physical therapy ensued, a painful stretch of boredom leaving Mendez unable to play guitar.
 ‘Mountain Dew Hell’ and ‘First Time’, the funereal A-side of the EP, are time capsules of that fever-dream; ‘Alone’ was the first song Mendez wrote once he was able to play guitar again. Likely none of the songs would have existed as-is if Mendez’s right hand hadn’t been out of commission, but they’re artful in their directness and simplicity. He initially thought he would need to refine them, building them out to the same scale as the self-titled album, but the more he returned to the work, the more it felt complete and true as it was.
 Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channelled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalogue has chronicled vivid violence and instability - a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives - but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.
 The EP accompanies a reissue of Mendez’s highly sought-after self-titled album on vinyl.

Tracklisting
Mountain Dew Hell
First Time
Alone
Pain Meds