Menomena, Mines
[Barsuk]
Reviewed by: Chris Polley
Full disclosure: I am addicted to the loop. When I recognize its presence, my eyes glaze over and my limbs go limp. I am hypnotized and absent from the world as I bask in its simple circuitry. My head bobs back and forth until I am a drooling mess and cannot perform basic human functions such as verbal articulation or rapid movement. I become a sloth, unaware in that moment of the loop’s debilitating power, so I fool myself into thinking that I should be responding this slowly to outside stimuli. The loop is when music not only repeats (as it often has to be considered “musical”), but folds over onto itself at a pace steady and entrancing, often multiple times and with varying amounts of syncopation and tonal shading so that a single repetition can end up sounding like a thirty-piece orchestra reveling in the perfect riff. It’s something so simple, that anyone with a sense of melody could do, that it’s often reduced to being a tool that musicians use when they don’t want to play music, but rather just sit and listen to a three-second combination of notes they’ve sculpted over and over again, like idiot savants obsessed with the arpeggio but not the actual songwriting process.
Well, Menomena is what happens when those savants don’t want to just please yours truly but also those who care about their musicians actually, you know, writing songs. Since their debut I Am the Fun Blame Monster, they’ve ostensibly been known as “the band that uses their own software or something to write their songs,” with little to no explanation ever given as to how exactly the Portland trio (and now touring foursome) utilized innovative looping technology to such distinctive effect. After all, when they play their songs live (and often when they’re officially put to tape), there is nary a loop pedal or sampler in sight. For all intents and purposes, Menomena look to eyes both trained and untrained to be your standard alt-rock band whose instrumentation includes keyboards, guitars, drums, and singing and whose structures are comprised of verses, choruses, intros, and bridges. But the thing that makes Menomena both infinitely maddening and rewarding to listen to is that despite their conventional tendencies, there is clearly some inexplicable quality simmering underneath the mix that makes them so much more than your run-of-the-mill group of dudes emoting through amplifiers.
What might make this faux-dichotomy even more agonizing for non-fans of the band is that we’re now two albums later and people are still name-dropping their intuitive looping program DEELER without explaining how much/little it actually has to do with the band’s songwriting process, while that indefinable but clearly signature quality the band’s music exudes with undeniable effect still remains in spades on their new record Mines. So here I will attempt to give a Cliff Notes version (but still more comprehensive than most explications out there) of just how this band has managed to fuse man and machine into one cohesive author, while still retaining a completely organic and warmly familiar end result sound. Much of my understanding comes from my own foray into the world of looping, but also from being unabashedly obsessed with this band’s forward-thinking approach to writing pop music – they at once embrace the predictable and the patterned while rebuking the stale and the outdated.
Granted, the best explanation out there comes from the band itself, which they outlined in detail during an interview with Tapeop shortly after the breakout success of their first full-length, which you can peruse here. But what’s possibly even more important to glean from that article than how the DEELER software works (which has remained relatively static over the years) is how the band’s resources have vastly increased since those first recording sessions of using the same SM57 microphone for each instrument, literally passing it from one musician to the next until enough loops are created to flesh them out into a fully tracked song later. It proves that this isn’t a band that tried to come up with a gimmick and then sell it to the music-consuming world. In fact, they seem genuinely taken aback by the fact that their idiosyncratic method of songwriting was looked at with such awe and amazement, as if they really just developed the idea because it suited their sensibilities and desires in the studio more. It’s this kind of DIY initiative and modest exploration of alternative ways of achieving a similar goal that catapulted into Menomena into the limelight, not the fact that they needed something that set them apart. They didn’t care that they were unlike anyone else out there; they were just trying to figure out what would work best for them.
And if one had to distill what it was about these three guys that made the DEELER program bring them to their relative heights of indie stardom, I would propose two common attributes found in every Menomena song: playfulness and intricacy. They are admirable qualities, to be sure, but they are also almost always impossible to communicate equally throughout an album, much less three long-players. So many equate playfulness with messiness and raw vigor, while those obsessed with meticulous composition and/or delicate earnestness always seem to believe that the cleaner and simpler the recording, the better it will be. They seem at odds with each other, just like the band’s organic/synthetic styles that this interplay begat, but rather than end up sounding like a band without direction and without vision, they developed a tool that allowed them to be both at once. They didn’t have to sit on the musical fence, so to say: they could dance wildly on one side and sit and think carefully on the other, simultaneously. Just listen to a song like “Bote” on Mines and depending on your mood or your environment, you’ll be jumping swinging your fists in the air like a madman or contemplating with wide eyes sitting pretzel-style on a bare floor.
So this is where the band’s unique songwriting process finally comes into play. They want to marry the visceral with the careful, the programmed with the unpredictable, the formula with the experiment. How do they do this? Take a step-by-step builder of a song like “Oh Pretty, You’re Such A Big Boy”, which if it wasn’t constructed using the band’s masterful looping, could easily sound drenched in torpor and blandness. It starts out with a deceptively simple ambient keyboard swell and some disaffected vocals coming back to the line “I fear I’m showing my age” just enough to make it seem like a refrain. But after the second repetition, five different sounds creep up out of the blue so quickly yet slyly that you’re barely able to keep track of them while listening. And still, for the first two-thirds of the song, everything’s quiet and subtle as if it’s just another ballad waiting to explode. But our brain has already heard the plunking piano loop, the crisp hi-hat loop, the shaking-in-the-cold guitar squeal, the pizzicato saxophone burps, and the coy “hoo-hoo”s that populate the underbelly of the track, so when the singers do finally let loose and harmonize together for the final act, all the pieces sound like they’ve been there all along. And the trick is that they have been; it’s just that the band wrote the song after they created the mass of interwoven textures rather than one step at a time. It feels like a climactic crescendo, but it’s actually that the band just held back and wrote a pop song using their best improvised licks doubling over on each other and their knowledge of how the pop format can sound most emotionally resonant when the world it constructs is both playful and intricate.
Never does Menomena indulge too heavily in this kind of listener manipulation, however. One might think otherwise, especially when imagining three talented melody-makers sitting in a circle, passing a mic as they pile one gut-induced riff on top of another, and then huddling around a computer to sort through them all and pick the ones that will hit the hardest, but it all sounds so natural and honest in the final work that it doesn’t matter. Imagine explaining this band to someone – it’s like if a Top 40 producer who says “you gotta know your audience’s buttons,” a jam band aficionado that proclaims “you gotta feel the music, man,” and a neo-classical composer who believes “one must consider balance and restraint.” It sounds like a dream, like the music of the future standing up and proving how uniting the medium can be when it’s looked at like a multi-faceted art form rather than a genre-ridden over-classified niche. And of course it’s completely natural to then go on the defensive and respond “well they’re just trying too hard,” or that “they’re thinking too much,” but Menomena prove with their unmatched aptitude for musical joy and experimentation that thinking and fun do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Even after two album covers featuring cartoon renderings (the first feral and child-like, the second professional and elaborate), they are still reworking this idea so it’s even more universal, more real, this time featuring a photograph of a statue partially obfuscated by leaves and branches. The statue is just a more ancient and sophisticated version of the modern cartoon, and also like the cartoon, it takes both a mind that is exploratory and a mind that is focused to create it. And besides, no one looks at the clay or the ink and claims that’s what made the art work great. Likewise, it’s important to understand the machine behind the men so you better understand the men’s intentions and creative process, but even when the machine and the men become audibly indistinguishable you don’t proclaim the machine to be the genius. And no, despite my tendencies, you don’t even call the loops the geniuses. You look to the men that made those loops into the sprawling expanses of emotion and beauty, and ultimately, if their output forced you to both think and feel, they have done their job. And Menomena have once again succeeded.
Rating: 94%