Philadelphia, PA’s Greg Mendez recently signed to Dead Oceans and today his new EP, First Time / Alone, is released on vinyl.
First Time / Alone came together in late summer and early fall of 2023, on the heels of the release of Greg Mendez, his self-titled breakthrough album, also being reissued via Dead Oceans. The forward momentum of that release, which landed on best of the year lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more, came to a quick halt following an intensive surgery on Mendez’s right wrist– a four-month purgatory of bad TV, canceled touring, and physical therapy ensued, a painful stretch of boredom leaving Mendez unable to play guitar. The EP’s A-side is a time capsule of that fever-dream. There’s something almost sacred in the weary bleating of the electric organ, Mendez’s left hand plucking out the chords, lonesome and unadorned.
Likely none of the songs on the EP 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 self-titled, but the more he returned to the work, the more it felt complete and true as-is.
The songs on the release 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 gray 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.
There is a distinctly handmade feeling to every aspect of Mendez’s world. On the First Time / Alone cover is a collection of stars found in a friend’s sketchbook, then colored in by Mendez with oil pastels – each stroke feels heavy, straining off the page, alive with a human touch. The same could be said for the cover of self-titled, a color pencil illustration of a forlorn mother Mary drawn by Mendez and his wife and bandmate, Veronica; in the portrait her massive eyes are turned upwards, hand outstretched, grace either offered or taken away.
Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog 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.
Praise for Greg Mendez:
“In less than two minutes, [Greg Mendez] can express a lifetime’s worth of pain, regret, and resilience.” -Pitchfork
“It’s at once a grandiose and understated work… Throughout the nine vignettes on this instrumentally minimal record, Mendez’s severe lyrical specificity opens up entire worlds in which the listener can find themselves.” -Rolling Stone
“In Mendez’s hands, coming to terms with the worst of times has led to music so grippingly human, you’ll want to hear him grapple with his demons on an endless loop.” -NPR
“A quiet masterpiece. Mendez’s unrefined, plaintive voice, his piercing melodies, and his conversational but haunting lyrics all mark him out as one of the best songwriters to come out of a city teeming with great songwriters.” -Stereogum
“The best songwriters can take visceral moments from their lives and bend them to the palettes of the people listening to them unfold, so they can inject themselves into these spaces; Mendez’s ability to leave that door cracked for the rest of us is what makes him one of our subtlest geniuses.” -Paste
“Brief yet powerful songs… One of the Philly DIY scene’s best-kept-secrets.” –Bandcamp Daily
“His words hold so much immediacy that there’s a freeing aspect to it. Greg Mendez is a religious experience.” -UPROXX
“Greg Mendez is a songwriter who understands that life is a matter of light and shade.” -The FADER
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