Greg Mendez’s ‘Beauty Land’ Is a Half-Hour Home Recording That Rejects the Long-Album Era

Greg Mendez put together his first album for Dead Oceans almost entirely alone in his home studio. The result, Beauty Land, lands as a pointedly compact collection: 14 tracks that rarely cross the three-minute mark, many of them done in under two. At a moment when album lengths keep stretching and streaming rewards sustained attention, the record’s brevity isn’t a gimmick—it’s a kind of structural honesty. These are songs built around a single melodic idea, delivered with economy and, just as often, a quiet sense of longing.

The album’s opening track, “I Wanna Be Pretty,” pairs a jaunty guitar line with lyrics about working a dead-end job and getting robbed late at night, when, as Mendez sings, “only people like me are out.” Its video shows him wandering empty suburban streets, detached from the warmth of houses around him. That tension—between outward simplicity and inward isolation—runs through much of the record. On “Frog,” a brief keyboard piece that’s over almost as soon as it starts, he repeats a plea for forgiveness in a voice that breaks with regret. The song feels like an unfinished thought, but its emotional charge doesn’t rely on duration.

Mendez’s near-falsetto and unadorned melodies inevitably invite comparisons to Elliott Smith, and tracks like “Everybody Wants to Be Your Friend (Except Me)” work close to that territory. But when he lets the songs expand, a distinct musical identity emerges. “No Evil” starts with plain strumming and then unfolds into a tangle of vocal parts, ricocheting off each other in something like a homespun symphony. “So Mean” stretches out further, swelling into a restrained piece of chamber pop without losing its wry undercurrent. These moments suggest a songwriter who knows exactly what he’s doing, even when he chooses to keep things small.

The tight runtime means some ideas feel extinct before they fully register. But that urgency is also the album’s organizing principle—a refusal to pad, an insistence on getting to the next thing quickly. Beauty Land doesn’t demand patience so much as it rewards attention to detail. For anyone sifting through too much music that overstays its welcome, Mendez offers a clear alternative.