:: Track Listing

1. Muscle’n Flo
2. The Pelican
3. Wet and Rusting
4. Air Aid
5. Weird
6. Rotten Hell
7. Running
8. My My
9. Boyscout’n
10. Evil Bee
11. Ghostship
12. West

:: Record Review

Menomena

Friend and Foe
(Barsuk; 2007)

Rating: 87%
Combined Rating: 80%


Sometime in the last few months I made a professional boner by telling Danny Seim, Menomena percussionist, that I loved Friend and Foe "this much," holding my hands as far apart as my meager wingspan could muster. Danny and Justin Harris and Brent Knopf are tall guys, a fact worth mentioning for milquetoasts like me, for their imposing, collective size renders them, if I may start and then push a flattering rumor here, a band of strange Adonises living up to every gregarious expectation amassed and plotting their modern mythoi in label leaps and expensive aesthetic bounds. They must be handsome, you see, because symmetry is now an unintended feature for their efforts; between I Am The Fun Blame Monster (2003) and Friend and Foe, Under An Hour, the soundtrack to a 2005 (Portland-based experimental dance company) Monster Squad performance, became a lynchpin of sorts, scaling back the band's ethos into spiraling specs of bare, repetitious melody built and deconstructed, over and over, to the point of flipping over on itself. Then, on either end were pop albums, shuddering pop albums with tummies bloated, giving off the impression that they were/are healthy when really they're malnourished, gobbling up their own viscera. I proposed this all to Danny and…

He said: I've never really thought of our albums in terms of their importance to one another. I wouldn't be surprised if most people consider it the "official" follow up to the Fun Blame Monster, because it's definitely more in the pop vein than our Under An Hour album. Actually, I think Friend and Foe is the poppiest thing we've ever released, but it also has some of the most tediously orchestrated abstract moments that we've ever attempted…I'd say a lot of these "moments" were a result of what we were aiming for with the Under An Hour project. I hope it's possible to notice some sort of natural progression over the course of all three albums.

CMG: Well, is there a sort of balance you guys have maintained throughout your time as a band? Even in the studio?

Danny: The recording process was much more stressful this time around. There was a constant amount of arguing, fighting, and general bitterness surrounding the three of us throughout most of the last two years while we were involved with this thing. We've never had an easy time in the studio setting though. With every new suggestion or idea, it's always assumed that it's going to be stretched three entirely different directions. It's rarely a clear majority (or even more rarely a consensus) in this democracy. Usually, one of us feels really strongly about something, another one of us opposes it equally strongly, and the third person is sort of lukewarm (but equally passionate about being lukewarm). It's occasionally a hostile environment, but after six years of this drama, we've learned to function within it.

*****

I like that idea of democracy, even if the logistics are flawed, because the "Deeler," or Digital Looping Recorder (programmed by Knopf), has allowed the band to grow over a simple genesis of drum clicks, each member adding sound and noise like a puzzle session of Russian Roulette, messing the patterns as each sonic politico sees fit; to grow into a swarthy machine. The software's old hat as far as Menomena trivia's concerned, but the gimmick of the process isn't vitiated by a new album that invites comparisons to their earlier works with structure, mood, instrumentation, theatricality, theme, and sense of humor. Fact is, Friend and Foe carries the same weight as the band's debut, shoulders the sophomoric glee, and literalizes it, hones it, ciphers it into a clear, round conceit: the songs are what they eat. And what they eat up is rigorous bureaucracy, stonier than democracy maybe, which, in turn, points directly to Menomena's method at hand. When "West" proves to be the album's most lucid matrix of mixed sound, wrapping a leaden, simple piano arpeggio in angry specters, a breathy vocal melody ("Between the skin and bone is where the West was won / I should never have gone") marries the philandering noises into something actually lucid. The listener can sense that balance of experimentation and knowing cliché, hearing the striations for the sinew, or the other way around, and can maybe then accept the predictability as a matter of pure craft.

Sure, this is a cop-out when it comes to baiting the listener with carefully concocted measures. The last twenty-five seconds of "Running," a jumble of voices rising together, hoping to find a footing for the key before the phlegmy bass annihilates the almost-silence, is cheap, yeah, and loud, definitely, but retrospectively lilting and not entirely expected when played against the brief song's shuffling beat. "Boyscout'n" takes its title to the easiest possible extent through sylvan whistling, griming the tone during the bridge while drill sergeants bark at the electric guitar's jagged notes. The whistle loses some sun, and we might get tired with the idea the band's prattling about here -- that is, the image of boy scouts maturing into militaristic manimals -- but threads drawn over the album are never overwrought, instead strung intuitively. The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off. Perhaps Menomena's sense of humor, their puns, and their grotesquely funny band photos are able to make something so thick and clattering so digestible, or even, so pristine. But that would be too easy.

CMG: Would it be wrong to call Friend and Foe the most accessible work you guys have ever done? I mean, I sense touchstones from music and artists I've loved growing up. Like, Jars of Clay at the climax of "My My" or Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" in the beginning epic thwomps of "Air Aid" or, I dunno, any post punk in the last fifteen years splitting up "The Pelican" and some sort of ska-pop attitude coloring the whistles and speckled saxes in "Boyscout'n"'s bridge.

Danny: Well, that was definitely the first time I've ever heard "Jars of Clay" and "Led Zeppelin" in the same sentence. I don't think God appreciated that one…be careful!

I agree with you about this album being more accessible, although it definitely wasn't planned to be that way. We've learned a few things about recording and mixing our own music over the years, and I think our songwriting is also a little more fleshed out this time around. I have a feeling you and I have loved a lot of the same artists growing up. But this sort of thing is completely subjective.

CMG: Although Friend and Foe doesn't seem to carry any conceptual burden as a whole, I've seen a thematic consistency emerge, especially dealing with themes of restraint and ingestion. I've even picked up on more overt Christian imagery, past mentioning "Jesus," and how faith demands sacrifice, which can be manifest in restraint and ingestion. …Um, why's it called Friend and Foe?

Danny: There's definitely a lot of consistent themes present in the record, although we didn't intentionally set out to record a concept album. That being said, it's sort of strange how one can draw so many parallels between the songs after hearing the whole thing. The "Friend and Foe" idea reflects the reoccurring theme of duality -- hating the people you love, and that sort of thing. I'm sure a lot of this was a direct reaction to the band dynamic while we were in the midst of the recording process.

CMG: What about Craig Thompson's artwork for the album? It's a beautiful collage, sinister even, with violent or unnerving images set in stark, Ren & Stimpy fantasy...um, a weird cacophony of birth and death, an invigorating orgy. Something like that. Does the packaging reinforce the album's themes?

Danny: We met Craig through John Askew at a concert a couple years back. Craig also did the art for a release by John's band Tracker. We all kept in touch and became close friends. Again, Portland is full of incredible people... A year or so ago, Brent had this crazy idea for CD packaging with a million die cuts and little eyes that followed you around the room, but it was glaringly obvious that none of us could illustrate this idea ourselves. We talked to Craig about it, and it just all sort of fell together. We had no idea it would turn out as elaborate as it did. Craig blew us all away.

The art definitely reinforces the album's themes. It's the first time we've included any sort of lyrics within a release, and it's most interesting to me because we didn't offer Craig any sort of explanation for these lyrics. He just wrapped his own amazing imagination around all of them, and he ended up with something that I'm still finding hidden layers in, months later. Thankfully, the art on the CD face ties everything together, or I'd be worried about people buying the thing and throwing away the musical portion.

*****

"Hating the people you love": thematically, it's a trap, because Menomena do nothing straightforwardly besides repeat and recontextualize their song structures, making difficult pop music (in practice) sound like the game of Life. If you think you've heard "Evil Bee" before, you have, maybe not in Fun Blame Monster's "Strongest Man in the World," the sleeping punisher of the album wielding the assertion, "I am fused out of iron," but in the way both songs plod behind the creakiest points in Justin's register, building to cement fucking apocalyptic walls of synth and piano and cymbals. "Bee" even repeats its forebear's sentiment: "...to be a machine / Oh, to be wanted, to be useful." Or, if you think you can predict the gist of "My My," you probably can, remembering the dripping, moaning melodrama of "Oahu." These two tracks even mirror the tracklist placement and shift in tone from the band's debut, further confounding whatever originality FnF pushes. That kind of parallelism is like some naïve acceptance of getting and eating one's cake, as is reserving space for "friends" and for "foes," because, ya know, life's hard and people are complicated and the same story's been told a million times anyway. Again, shit's too easy.

If "Friend" and "Foe" harbor the same contradiction as the difference between "experimentation" and "cliché," then I'm right in feeling slightly shamed with my adoration. Not only have I invited Danny along for the criticism of his own band's album, but I've decimated the distance I should have placed between critic and artist, balking at the fallout that will no doubt be received once I've implied that Menomena and me, we're in cahoots together. Isn't an album review a transaction anyway, offering "constructive" criticism for publicity (paying no mind to the actual outreach of the publication) and joining these two sides in everything, save artistic communion? There's an old Italian proverb that I may or may not have just invented that goes: "If something needs fed, something gets fed."

What's wrong with a bit of gorging here and there? "Muscle n' Flo" demonstrates no restraint whatsoever, mushing a showy mix of bobsled drums with thin slide guitar, dainty bells, and a chorus, from the beginning, that could support a demagogue's march off the edge of the world. And that's how it shakes from the speakers, dipping into an abyss, pulling choirs down like lemmings while only yelling shunted, confusing cadences about artifice: "In the morning / I stumble / My way towards / The mirror and my makeup / It's light out / And I now / Face just what I'm made of." In fact, Menomena writes a lot about immutability, wondering out loud what will still be around when things have dried up, died, fallen apart, blown apart, washed away, or gone extinct. "Air Aid" (pronounced as one word, legato'd together to force the duality) accentuates their fears. Harris sings (his voice so much more assured than anything the band's ever attempted), "Write the suicide note into the movie: / 'I love you all too much to carry on,' " then drawing out a lupine howl over obvious shakers: "Rain is falling through the floor," stripping the song to its bones. If the band's only compensating for the ephemeral brunt of its methods, especially with its Deeler, then Menomena should run a workshop for most radio-ready pop and call it a day. Instead, every mundane note or yip or comic book snap is handled with such fascinated care, agreed upon, and placed among such confessional fence-hopping, that the mediocre becomes inimitably gorgeous and concessions based on the simplicity or repetition of structure and instrumentation end up coming off as pompous.

None of this is appropriate, necessarily, and contrition must be made if any seriousness can be culled from Danny's words overlapping -- formally dominating -- my own. I admit, then, that Friend and Foe plays to the child in me. No, that's not fair; Friend and Foe gives in to the glutton in me. I once called the album "bulimic," and I wanted the term to exist in a vacuum, subsumed by innocent notions of absorption, restraint, and, then, calculated purging. I was wrong; I just wanted to emphasize how indulgent the record can seem, how cathartic pop tropes can still be when left to the hands of three really nice dudes from Portland.

All in all, even Ships (2006) wasn't this easy to like. Danielson's opus dragged with the prequalification of Artist as Challenge and, for the most part, Friend and Foe isn't a challenge at all (until repeated listens are demanded and its nooks are un-crannied). Then, it becomes too easy to befriend, and the measure from tension to release, from hard to soft, from thick to thin drops and the sides become symmetric. If Friend and Foe imbues itself with duality in and out, then I'm willing to accept that such convoluted subjects are as supple as AOR.

Menomena wants to be loved, and I can bear that neediness. I mean, it's what I want, too.

CMG: So, you have the album release on the 28th in Portland, and you're employing a fifteen-person choir to fill up vocal duties. How's that going?

Danny: The rehearsals are going well, thanks. Justin's been doing a wonderful job directing. I think we've already come a long way. It's a giant mass of Portlanders that are donating their time and talent to make our release party special. It's a truly humbling experience for us, and only reinforces the fact that we're so incredibly fortunate to exist in this community. Here's a link to a video I took last night of our third overall get-together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWEsduQ57OI

CMG: …

Danny: …

CMG: …I love you. Dom Sinacola :: 18 January 2007 |