Menomena - Mines

Thu 7th Oct, 2010 in Music Reviews

Portland band Menomena weave in and out of genres with dizzying ease, making it difficult to summarise them as anything more than the very broad ‘art rock’. Mines skips from style to style, often within the same song – sax skronk and psych-rock bass clouds on Bote; bleak piano thunder and military drum fills on Killemall – so much so that it could almost be the work of several different bands. That ‘almost’ is important – though they work within a range of indie-rock sounds and signifiers, Menomena never sound quite like anyone else, and that shapes Mines into something more than a series of weird songs.

Menomena’s unusual writing process plays a strong role in shaping their identity. Using a program written by band member Brent Knopf wrote as a college assignment, the three multi-instrumentalists (Knopf, Danny Seim and Justin Harris ) build instrumental loops one by one, improvising layer upon layer until it begins to take shape. The resultant bits and pieces are then taken apart and re-assembled into something resembling a song.

As an idea, the technique is nothing new – Miles Davis made On The Corner in 1972 by (quite literally) cutting up tapes of studio jams and building them into an album. What makes this method relevant is Menomena’s constructive and destructive approach to songwriting, and the idiosyncratic music that came of it. Each song on Mines feels like it has been built up and broken down over and over again, until any kind of recognisable chord progression or familiar touchstone is stripped away. Lots of bands are hailed as being ‘experimental’, but few are really willing to tear apart their own music with the objectivity that Menomena demonstrate. One purpose of experimentalism is to find a distinctive mode of expression by avoiding the well-worn grooves of popular culture, and Menomena have come as close to achieving that as anything in the last ten years or more.

As a result of their unconventional approach, the emotional content of Mines is harder to extract. Having listened to Mines several times, I feel no closer to understanding what Menomena mean when they sing “leave the lunchmeat out for the sharks” on Lunchmeat, nor can I adequately explain the eerie self-examination of Killemall. This is very different from suggesting that there is no emotional depth – it’s more the case that each song deals with very complex emotion in a highly coded way, making it harder to come to grips with than “baby baby baby ooh baby”.

Of course, this means that Mines is not an album that will appeal to all. With its strange angularity and bone-deep idiosyncrasy, you won’t catch Queen Black Acid soundtracking a soft drink commercial, but its strong identity and depths to be explored, those who connect with it will not just like it, but love it.