Friend And Foe By Menomena
My, my, aren't these some clever young chaps. I know most everyone will not like this kind of music because it certainly isn't very accessible, but I cannot say enough good things about this disc. First of all, it took me forever to find because I didn't want to download it from iTunes. I found it, finally, at the Borders in Brentwood of all places. Both Vintage Vinyl locations didn't have it, nor did the couple of Slackers that I walked into. In fact, I completely stumped the tattoo guy at the Granite City Vintage Vinyl. It had to kill him to see suburban dad looking guy come off as hipper than him. The art on the CD is worth the price of the disc alone, even if it didn't have any songs on it. First off, there's art on the disc itself. There's also art covering the liner notes. On top of that, the liner notes have cut out spaces on it which allow you to see the disc while it's inside the jewel case. To add another level, the liner notes can be folded 4 different ways to create 4 different types of art. Spin the CD a little in the jewel case, close it, and it creates yet another piece of dynamic art. Very, very unique. The drawings are by Craig Thompson and I can say I've never seen anything like it. Pop art at it's finest.
Being clever is nothing new to Menomena. Their previous release, I Am The Fun Blame Monster is so named because it is a anagram of Menomena's First Album. I checked, it really is. I've deliberately not purchased their first CD until I wrote this review just so I wouldn't be skewed on what a fantastic CD this really is. As soon as I finish this though, I'm going straight to iTunes to buy it.
Menomena's approach to songwriting is completely unique. One of the first things you'll notice is that there are only three guys and you can frequently hear way more instruments than that on any given song. Obviously they layer the tracks because no three guys can at any one time play guitar, drums, piano, bass, and baritone sax. But that in and of itself doesn't make their songwriting unique. Every basement artist in the world can do that today with software and every time I think about writing my own music that's exactly how I'd have to do it. That approach certainly touches a commonality with how I think about writing music, but that's nowhere close to the unique part of Menomena's songwriting techniques. One method that they use is to have a series of clicks keep time as the three artists take turns adding layers. Seems a bit odd, but that's not the bizarre method either though. The more diverse way they've done this is to write their own computer program to generate sounds, which they then try to reproduce using the cacophony of instruments they know how to play. The results are amazing to me and the idea of writing computer programs to generate random music has a very certain appeal to me.
Like I mentioned before, this will not be for everyone, but right now this is running neck and neck with the latest Shins release for top album of 2007 for me. With such song writing methodologies as this, you can guess that there is no one that sounds like Menomena. Early Modest Mouse has a similarity, but Menomena is much more smooth and refined; plus you don't have to put up with the screeching of Isaac Brock. In fact, the production values on Friend And Foe are as good as you'd find on any major label, packaged for shopping mall commercials music that you'll find today. With the baritone saxophone Menomena, at times, have sort of a Morphine quality, but nowhere near the sparseness of the late great Mark Sandman. At times it does sort of sound like an homage to Sandman though. Other than the song structure obscurity of early Modest Mouse and the Morphine baritone sax part, this is truly an original piece of music that starts a little slow and builds into a crescendo. My personal favorite songs are My, My, Evil Bee, West, and Air Aid, but if you listen to this repeatedly, by the 5th listen you'll realize that every song is unlike any other you've ever heard.
Luckily, if you're skeptical, you can stream the whole CD over at Barsuk Records. (You'll notice that Barsuk has a stable of very good bands in addition to the ones that I've already talked about). Streaming the record was what I did first, but by the time I made it to Air Aid I knew I was going to buy it. If, of course, I could find it.
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