You don't see a whole lot of humility in the indie-rock world, except perhaps for the sort of "look-how-humble-I-am" stuff that's carefully tailored to get press. That's what makes Athens, Georgia's Mendoza Line so...unexpected. Their liner notes quote bad reviews and downplay the details of band members' lives, and of course their very name is a baseball term for the shallow end of the adequacy pool. But their music...Their music is self-effacing, understatedly modest and, more often than not, utterly mindblowing. I'm not saying that the Mendoza Line's dampened guitar/bass/feedback approach is unique, any more than the wan vocals or the piano, keyboards, horns and violin that pepper the songs offer any documentable revelation. It's all in the assembly. Whether it's the rainy-day blur of "Social Thursday", the punch-drunk punk of "Pushing Buttons", the almost new-wave boy-girl vocal and proto-Peter-Hook bassline of "(We'll Never Make) The Final Reel" or the Mould-y vocals, Britpoppy melody and soaring chorus of "If I Am Not What You Are Used To", you'll realize there's an intangible something extra at work when the Mendoza Line build a song. It would also be criminal to exclude the lyrics, unpredictable mini-epics of stumbling poetry that hide their wit and wisdom beneath a veil of off-the-cuff spontaneity. If mediocrity has this much character, imagine what would happen if the Mendoza Line ever got good?