Thursday, April 27, 2017

One Last Pick Thru the Bins Volume 24: Menomena. Who Might Be My Favorite Band

Large intestines, c'mon forward! Shake it!

I first heard Menomena in…well, looks like that happened on
August of 2012, but I actually pulled it from PDX Pop Now!’s 2010 compilation.
The specific song was “Five Little Rooms.” I have been listening to that same
song, often late at night and sufficiently loose (or tight…still struggling
with which way to go there), since then, trying to decipher its meaning. I’m no
Charlie Manson, some clown sifting the sound and lyrics for instructions on how
to bring about Racist Doomsday (true story). Still, everything about that song – the drums pounding
as if on the walls of those rooms, and vaguely funereal sound of the piano, the
soaring buzz of the guitars toward the end, the mocking chorus – somehow recalls sensations
of panic. Or, as one part of the lyrics puts it, “Click your heels and get the
hell away.” Look, it sounds much more artful in the song...

We’re all familiar with the record store routine, the act of
walking in there with a head full of ideas about what to buy, only to have every
last idea leak out one aisle to the next, each successive band’s name taking
you further and further from those original thoughts. When music collecting
went mostly online, I stopped going to record stores – probably due to the
above, too – but the day I finally did go, though, Menomena stayed front and
center until I walked it to the register. “Five Little Rooms” had everything to
do with that.

The above might reek of obsessive fandom, but, until this
week, I’ve never quite pored over Menomena’s albums; and it’s rare that I pull
a song apart like I did (and do) with “Five Little Rooms.” It’s not my style,
for one (see: this entire goddamn project), but there’s also no world in which
Menomena makes for easy listening. It’s not even that they don’t do infectious
beats and addictive hooks – though they don’t do them much. Menomena is a study
of details, the process of trying to catch and piece out the way they construct
each song. They’re a band built not just for volume, but for the era of
earbuds; listening to them almost requires sound-blocking, because it’s too
easy miss an instrument, or some accent, or fail to note how, in one song, they
built one bridge on a choppily pulsing saxophone, and the next bridge by
plucking twinkles out of strings (see: “Weird”). That one also has one of my
favorite lyrical phrases: “There’s no love lost that I can’t find again.” (Damn
it! Typing that in plain text strangles the lyrics. Delivery matters. The way
one communicates a thought or a feeling will always change it. Obviously.)

It feels right to tackle Menomena from the angle of
approach, because it’s a big part of their sound. It starts with their songwriting
process, something covered on the band’s Wikipedia page:

"First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played
through a pair of headphones. We then take turns passing a single mic around
the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instrument, while another
one of us will lay down a short improvised riff over the click track. We
usually start with the drums. Once the drums begin looping, we throw on some
bass, piano, guitar, bells, sax, or whatever other sort of noisemaker happens
to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process democratic, which is the only way
we can operate."

Also worth noting: they compose their songs slowly and,
apparently, over email. It takes them a while, too, and maybe that painstaking process
lands on something about them: they don’t write bad songs. No “I Was Made for Loving You, Baby,” for these guys. Don’t get me wrong: their songs aren’t my
children, perfect little things I’m obliged to love equally, because I don’t.
When I say they don’t write bad songs, I mean there’s nothing cheap in their
music, nothing easy. It’s possible that oversimplifies things, because it’s not
like the band has to reinvent the wheel every time they record: Menomena has a
sound, something their fans (like me) respond to, and, because there’s so much
in what they do, they can keep mining that massive goddamn vein till they die
and compulsive twits like me will keep coming back to pull apart the puzzle so
we can see how this one fits together.

For all the parts that comprise most Menomena songs, their
particular genius comes with their talent for giving each of those parts space
to breathe and be heard. Again, so long as one listens with earbuds; try this
in a car, and you’re fucked, you’ll miss half of it at a minimum. Some of it comes
by way of contrasts so vivid you can’t miss them: a heavy, rhythmic baseline
thudding at the floor, while a piano twinkles in all the open space above it
(again, God bless the piano). No less often, they seem to dial back every other
sound in order to let the element they want step the foreground. The band hauls
the guts of what they’re doing front and center, basically, sort of like one of
those old see-through anatomy statuettes: the listener only has to pay
attention to hear with decent clarity how the component parts fit together to
make the sound.

Insofar as Menomena has a sound, they also possess the
talent, precision and boldness to excavate every last possibility within that
sound. And, as most of your better bands, they pulled their sound to slightly
different ground as they need to in order to expand it. Like most acts these
days, their oeuvre gets a little sloppy between remixes and remastered
editions, but I relied on four albums to produce this post: I Am the Fun Blame
Monsters! (2003; also, anagram, or whatever the fuck those things are called), Friend And Foe (2007), Mines (2010), and Moms (2012). The
progression from beginning to end isn’t so rare – e.g., Blame Monster’s sounds
spare and experimental next to Moms’ tidied up and, frankly, lighter, cleaner
sound – and that’s not an insult for once. It’s the opposite, actually; Momsmight be my favorite. The close second? Friend And Foe. Or vice versa. It’s
close.

To make a distinction, Friend And Foe feels like an anchor
for Menomena’s “sound”: they're as broad musically on that album as they feel
anywhere, but there’s more assurance in the music than on Blame Monster. Moms,
meanwhile, shows what they can do in the same space when they want to, for lack
of a better word, have fun. There’s something I picked up in music theory video
that I can’t stop hearing when I listen to Moms, even if someone could tell me
I’m 100% full of shit on a closer listen: the brighter notes on that album
makes me wonder if the band didn’t just switch to major chords for that one.
But listen to “Plumage” and “Skintercourse” next to, say, “Muscle’n Flo” and “Running”
and tell me the former isn’t lighter. And poppier. And there’s nothing wrong
with that.

Every Menomena album has enough to 1) fan-crush over and 2) pull
apart that I could go on for four more pages (one for each album; oh yeah!). Because
I like everything, basically, I don’t know where to start except to talk about
everything. Rather than lard up the rest of this post with links to Youtube videos of
uneven quality, instead I’m going to close out this post by listing all the
songs that I’ll be posting to a Spotify playlist (yes, another one) and posting
to twitter. There are a couple things I want to touch on before that, though.

First, I want to return to the idea about not loving all
Menomena songs equally. I spent today (at work; built-in limitation) specifically
listening for songs I liked well enough, but not a lot, never mind loved. I
only got all the way through two albums – Blame Monster and Friend And Foe…the
latter of which, it feels relevant to point out, might be my favorite. Even so,
I pulled out “Boyscout’n” and “Running” as two songs that sort of fell short;
the latter feels a little like parody. Blame Monster (A & B sides) has
more: “Strongest Man in the World,” “Shirt” (which, per my notes, “all the
elements, just a little flatter”), “Nebali”, and “Monkey’s Back” (but even that
wandering mess has a heavy middle section that blows my damn mind). When I
listened to Mines later, I found a couple more that leave me flat - “BOTE” and “Oh, Pretty Boy, You’re Such a Big Boy” – so it’s not like they’re batting 1.000. Though,
for me, their average clearly floats on the high end. (Guys! It's, like, .750!)

The second point gets at something central to what I love
about Menomena. Disappointment, alienation and generally picking at the
protective devices that scab over raw emotional truth are some favorite themes.
And, to be clear, I love that stuff. It is my fucking jam. I savor songs that
push on raw nerves in the same way I spend all day pushing on an aching tooth
and for exactly the same reason. Even if I can’t wrap my thoughts around every
piece of why that feels like life’s realest pleasure, that’s a lot of what I’m listening
for in lyrics: some version of truth.

And, that’s enough for this one. Below are the 20 (edit; see below) songs that
I either love or that I feel best represent them as a band. My guess is that
those two sentiments cross over, and multiple times. At any rate, the songs are
below and the playlist is on Spotify, and with a link on my twitter feed.