Review Summary: Menomena have trimmed some of their quirkiness, but it isn’t a resignation so much as a process of refinement.
When first delving into
Mines, the third LP (fourth if you count the modern dance score) from indie-rockers Menomena, I was unsure of how I felt. Compared to
I am the Fun Blame Monster and even
Friend and Foe,
Mines appeared to have lost the quirkiness that had accompanied Menomena from the get go. It was an endearing quirkiness, not a forced one. It created an aesthetic that was all their own, and Mines seemed to have smoothed some of those edges. That should be a bad thing. Should. So while I was gearing myself up for another slight disappointment * la The Dodo’s Time to Die from last year, Mines continued to etch its way into me at that subconscious level where all great music resides. The place where you could keep a song tucked away, never listened to for years, until bringing it back one day just to remind you, “hi, I’m f
ucking great.”
Maybe that little preamble is just a tad misleading. Yes the quirks have been smoothed out a bit, but this is still a Menomena album. It is more accessible on the whole, with fewer honking horns and strange detours. The band has continuously plugged away at crafting their own sound, refining the sporadicness, loud-soft dynamics, home made production software and angular hooks into something that is beyond gimmickry.
Mines finds the band finally settling in on their exact sound and the result is their best flowing work to date. From the slow burn opener “Queen Black Acid”, the band take the loud-soft patterns that use to be the signature of their songs, and apply it over the course of the whole album. In this sense there are two main climax points to the work; the sublime “Dirty Cartoons” and the epic “Sleeping Beauty” (for my money, one of the best songs of the year). Mines is a cohesive effort that rewards multiple listens from front to back.
But that doesn’t mean there are no individual stand outs. In fact the album is packed with them, as each and every song has at least one moment that grabs your attention just when you think it might be waning. The guitar jabs and hi-hat rush of “Tithe”, or the rush of drums and piano when Brent Knopf sings “siren’s sing in monotone / harmonized in deathly drone” on “Lunchmeat”. Menomena are a band that know their way around a melody and have great skill in layering an intricate and dynamic backdrop to these songs. The arrangements, at times, are chaotic with the amount of sounds going off from different instruments but a patient listener should enjoy picking it all apart; just look at the numerous melodies and counter-melodies hidden inside the instrumental breakdown of “Oh Pretty Boy, You’re Such a Big Boy”. It should come as no surprise to fans of the band that the album is a treasure chest full of little bits that flesh out skeletal frames that would already equal a pretty quality album in the first place
So yes, Menomena have trimmed some of their quirkiness, but it isn’t a resignation so much as a process of refinement. The result is surely the band’s strongest effort to date, and that’s coming off a high quality back catalogue.
Mines is an album that stands apart for
actually being different, and that’s an important trait. In a world where anyone coming up with an ironic genre combination seem to labeled as original, Menomena transcend. They sound fresh and unique because their music itself is. They’re perfectionists who hone over their work until it fits just right, not settling on something just because it’s catchy. It may not have the same hype machine toting “album of the year” accolades like The National, Titus Andronicus or Janelle Monae might have, but Mines certainly deserves to be there on merit alone.
