Menomena

Mon 31st Jan, 2011 in Features

Perhaps the short blurb on the Laneway Festival website says it best: “if there’s any justice in rock, Portland trio Menomena may well be the most important band of the next decade.”

After ten years together, accumulating praise without ever really managing to cross over into the public consciousness, Menomena released their fourth album Mines midway through 2010 to near-universal acclaim, and are making their first trip Down Under to take part in this year’s Laneway Festival. They have been touring hard for the past six months, but Justin Harris has a good feeling about it all. “The last touring bit was good, and exciting”, he tells me over the phone. “The shows were all good, and it’s fun to finally learn and nail down the songs, and learn them in a way that we haven’t done before. I feel like, by the time I get to Australia, we should be playing those songs better than ever.”

Menomena are a fascinating band. The course of their career reads like an indie/DIY ‘How To’ guide: their first (self-released) album included an 80-page hand-assembled booklet; their second album, Under An Hour, was written in collaboration with experimental dance company Monster Squad and although there were only three tracks, each was over seventeen minutes long, and 2007’s Friend and Foe was nominated for a Grammy for ‘Best Recording Package’ for the hidden messages and decoder rings contained within, illustrated by a ‘cult graphic novelist’ friend of theirs. These guys don’t muck around.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about them is their recording technique, based around a computer program known as Deeler (Digital Loop Recorder, or DLR). Essentially how it works is that Deeler begins the process by generating a click track, and then each member of the band records a few small snippets of improvised music in response to the click track. After that, Person A will record more snippets based on what Person B originally recorded, thus creating numerous different yet related loops. Then at a later date they return to these snippets, pick the ones that work best, and then they begin to build songs around those loops, and those improvised snippets – sometimes they will build a song out of two or three notes, and sometimes a quarter of the song has appeared through the loops.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet it has enabled this band to write tremendously intricate, complex songs bursting with ideas. And, as they have remarked in earlier interviews, it completely removes the individual’s ego from the process.

This strange alchemy seems to have a flow-on effect on the lyrics, too. Despite all three members writing lyrics for the songs that they themselves have arranged “At the end of our DLR sessions someone will say, “I like this one, this one and that one””, Harris tells me, “and they will go away and work on those, and we all do that. It’s just understood that one of us is taking the majority of the work at any one time.

“However we don’t ever talk about our lyrics to each other, or criticise lyrics, and we don’t ever have that discussion in the formative process, so it’s always interesting to find out, once the album is sequenced, and put together, and exists as a final product, it’s always interesting to see how many parallels there are between songs, and how it all fits together, mood-wise.”

I offer a theory that this lyrical-ESP might have something to do with being a band for ten years, and having similar life experiences at similar ages, but Harris tells me that’s not really the case. “The three of us are all very different”, he tells me, “and we have all gone through different things in the past three years, but somehow it all fit together. “[But I do] think the lyrics in this album are certainly a little more heart-on-your-sleeve than before. And maybe, as we’re getting older, a little less embarrassed, or less secretive about what we actually want to say. I think, in the past, we’ve always tried to cloak our thoughts in more obscure lyrics, and ones that can be applied to anybody and that you can interpret any way you wish, really. But I think on this album I feel like this is what we’re trying to say, and that we’re not hiding from that, necessarily.”