It's easy to conflate Shannon McArdle with the characters in her songs. Summer of the Whore, her first album since the end of both her former band, the Mendoza Line, and her marriage to Line singer Timothy Bracy, is full of first-person songs that document romantic splits with such alarming detail and carefully parsed emotions that it seems they must be autobiographical. And they are, but only up to a certain point. In a recent interview, she asserts she's exaggerating her feelings to make a point and evoke a very specific despair. So Summer of the Whore is fictional autobiography: Those who know McArdle from the Mendoza Line want all the drama and the blame, the recrimination and conflict, and she doesn't fail to deliver.
Regardless of how closely they match up with her experiences, these are frank, tough-minded songs that convey McArdle's maturity, humor, and self-destructiveness-- a potent combination-- in the face of such heartache. As the drums and guitars settle into a hypnotic circular pattern, opener "Poison My Cup" recounts either one final coupling or some one-off hook-up: "Don't have to tell me you love me, baby, I'll still go down," she sings dryly, as if describing a business transaction, and the back-up singers turn that phrase into an unexpected chorus. The title track is equally candid, drawing out the long "o" in "whore" languidly, truly owning it. Because she's casting and accepting these assignations herself, McArdle retains her dignity and authority, such that Summer of the Whore is best when it's most poignant, as on "Paint the Walls" when she asks, "Do I sleep on my side or in the middle of the bed?" and the back-up singers echo her resignation: "You're really not coming back."
At times these songs play like the narrator of Exile in Guyville disillusioned anew with adult relationships, and you won't be blamed for hoping Liz Phair has a late-career album in her that's so brutally candid and complex. But that implies Summer of the Whore is on par with that album musically, and it's not. In leaving the Mendoza Line, McArdle has also left all traces of the hard-bitten alt-country with which the band made its name. A clean break is understandable, but she has replaced it with a more urban, placeless sound that doesn't have much character. At its most interesting, Summer of the Whore flirts with lo-fi but keeps nearly every song drably midtempo. That's fine on tracks like "I Was Warned" and "CA DRL & 170", which gain their power from their measured pace, but even the garage-rock of "Leave Me for Dead", with its twisty rhythm and stabs of organ, plays hesitantly. Why not cut loose on a song that obviously demands a sense of rambunctious abandon? This ruminative approach seems designed to showcase McArdle's vocals, but she's spent nearly a decade now proving she can hold her own against anybody. When she makes an album that's as bold and witty musically as lyrically, she'll finally escape the shadow of her former band.
