Send "Menomena " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pastemagazine |
 Menomena has always taken a cut-and-paste approach to songwriting. The trio’s 2004 debut, I Am The Fun Blame Monster!, juxtaposed stilted crescendos of piano, guitar and saxophone with silence. The melodies of 2007’s Friend and Foe were a bit more bombastic—drums pounding, horns blasting—though the remaining loops still entered and exited without warning, cutting out before they could air out.Monster and Foe were sonically tidy, moody yet never indulgent. On Mines, however, full-blown insanity finally breaks free of the straightjacket. Take “Killemall,” an apocalyptic race between steady drums and scurrying piano arriving nearly 10 minutes into the album; the song rises and falls in just the right places, with agitated flutes and electric guitars spinning like helicopter rotors at the start and finish and ascending strings acting as checkpoints cuing verses’ end....full text |
| Cokemachineglow. |
| Mines is an unhappy album. This is nothing new; it’s a distinction Mines shares with any of Menomena’s previous releases—which, in retrospect, (darkened to chiaroscuro by Mines’s dour shadow) are seeming sadder and sadder by the day. Who knew I Am the Fun Blame Monster (2003) was beset by such a pall of dread? That the serpentine and oddly accented “I am / Fused out of / Iron” was so…pathetic? Fans, for one, and their numbers are growing: by now, Menomena is way bigger than Portland, an ever-burgeoning popularity built on sad bastard music disguised by the visceral thrills of freewheelin’ electronica. It’s a sophisticated, labored sound they’ve put their name to, but one with a cartoonish bent, every anagram, flipbook, and uneasy reference to Christian cock-rock one more distraction from the truth that the emotions this music conveys are as cartoonishly proportioned as its special edition vinyl. Failure, angst, spiritual repression: these are ripe for the picking in any Menomena song, these melodramatic and consuming feelings—but sometimes a sputtering hi-hat is a lot more fun. And Mines just may be the band’s unhappiest music yet—unhappy like it’s got something to prove unhappy; unhappy like all the album’s press materials ring out with its mighty unhappiness unhappy; unhappy like it is made lean and tired by the weight of the world unhappy. But Mines has nothing to prove and no one to prove it to: it is still, despite how diversely exciting this stuff sounds, a compendium of pained recollections and desperate pleas, half-hearted battlecries and year-late resolutions, all masked by a lot of really neat, pretty noise. In other words, the trajectory of Mines’s sadness is always inward—Mines is sad for the sake of sad. Mines is unhappy like impenetrably unhappy unhappy. As a portrait of irreconcilable alienation, the loneliness on Mines is so overwhelming that their three-piece feels more than ever like the product of one. And so Mines plays out like a pop interpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, where privileged cast-offs long for a sense of place and belonging, for a genuine connection with other people they know, bone-deep, doesn’t exist. Other people: as Mines sees it, their lives are just heading perpetually downhill, “like a bobsled without the teamwork / or the televised support” as it’s lamented on “Tithe.” Antonioni’s damned fill their lives with decadence and deviance, glitzy diversions to pass the time or, even better, to maybe help them, for brief moments, feel something, and on Mines Menomena do much the same. The starburst drum-fills, the jackknife stabs of guitar, the vocal melodies bronzed with catchiness—all of it soars, nodding at vitality, as though the aesthetics of joy might, if stressed enough, smother sadness until it’s finally gone for good. It distracts us, too, makes us forget for a second what this stuff is really about. When “Tithe” declares, ad infinitum, that “nothing sounds appealing,” are we hearing it? Because Mines, after all, sounds so very appealing; this is some of the band’s best-sounding work to do date. This is about alienation and boredom swirling, like a barbershop pole, toward self-esteem’s great black hole, but it’s hard not to fall over ourselves with excitement for just how far this band has come and how assuredly their compositions unfold....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| I have to give Menomena credit. When they emerged, they built all their songs using their own software. The approach worked really well, resulting in a wildly creative debut LP, I Am the Fun Blame Monster. But the band refused to let the process become the point, and seven years later, on their third album (not counting Under an Hour), you have to listen carefully to even detect the modular, mix-and-match method the band still employs in the studio. Mines, more than any of their previous work, really sounds like the trio did as much conventional songwriting as jamming, looping, and editing. It's a direction Menomena hinted at on 2007's Friend and Foe, but here they seem to have evolved into a band much more at ease with itself, and consequently a lot less preoccupied with blowing your head off every eight bars. Granted, the hyperactive creativity of their first two albums was part of charm and excitement, but the low-key Mines is a welcome change of pace. While it's less immediate, with time it reveals a wealth of details and surprises on par with the band's other albums. Lyrically, the band seems particularly concerned with carrying on in spite of vulnerability, inadequacy, and age, sounding all the more unsettled amid the confident music. In fact, I've never spent so much time poring over the lyrics to a Menomena record. The album's loudest, most uptempo song, "Taos", features a charging chorus built around the line, "I'm not the most cocksure guy," plunked right into a narrative of mutual, drunk seduction-- the narrator keeps voicing his doubts even as his actions are confident and even aggressive. Elsewhere, they've applied the modular approach they use for their instruments to the voices, finding a multitude of ways to harmonize, combine, and recombine the "and nothing sounds appealing" refrain from "Tithe". And the instrumental touches are often clever-- there's a little sax figure that pretty much makes the whole rhythm track of "Bote", and the chunks of ascending piano that pop up in just the right places on "Oh Pretty Boy, You're Such a Big Boy" keep the song moving every time it hits a pause. Brent Knopf's mini synth solo is a welcome surprise, too....full text |
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