The Mendoza Line is a brainy indie rock band from Brooklyn and everything that implies. On “Full of Light and Full of Fire” (Misra), their seventh album, they channel the spirit of hard-drinking loser-heroes American Music Club and the Replacements (“the two greatest pop bands” of the Mendoza Line’s formative years, according to their website) and set it against well-crafted country melodies. Songs of beer-soaked regret are mixed with heady Air America-approved protest: “Name Names” references Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and Whitaker Chambers, while “Golden Boy (Torture in the Shed)” is an ode to the “oppressed women of Saudi Arabia” that isn’t nearly as tortured as that sounds.

The album alternates between two vocal extremes: Timothy Bracy’s drowsy, Dylan-esque drawl and Shannon McArdle’s twangy soprano. But where he always sounds like he’s ready to pass out on the bar, she’s more sprightly and versatile. On “Water Surrounds,” the album’s gauzy opening track, McArdle sounds like Hope Sandoval making a go of it in Nashville. A song later, on “Catch a Collapsing Star,” she’s big and brassy – Neko Case without the rafter-shaking pipes.

The latter song – a rollicking, alt-country tune reminiscent of the Thrills and the Tyde – is the album’s highlight. Bracy and McArdle’s voices work so well here – alternating verses, sharing choruses – that you wonder why they don’t sing together more often. “I could see you blazing through the frost / An amazing grace and a hacking cough,” Bracy sings, crafting a wonderfully conflicted image. ” … Accept no imitations, baby, catch a collapsing star / It’s your limitations that make you what you are.”

However, the band’s limitations become all too obvious as the album wears on. Like Joanna Newsom and the Decemberists, the Mendoza Line is enamored with language. Unfortunately, they’re also well acquainted with the thesaurus; most songs sound like they were written with it open on the table. Rhyming words like “contemptuous,” “penance,” “consensus,” and “licentious” in a song that sounds borrowed from the Carter family (“The Lethal Temptress”) may score cleverness points, but it comes at the cost of emotional forcefulness. It’s too cute and considered to be heartfelt. The same can be said of most of the album – “Full of Light and Full of Fire” lacks a little too much of both. Friday at Knitting Factory (74 Leonard Street, 212-219-3132).