8 July 2008 :: Listravahungover.

Track Listing

1. Water
2. Flour
3. Light

Record Review

Menomena

Under An Hour
(FilmGuerrero; 2005)

Rating: 79%
Combined Rating: 78%


There are two things this album is definitely not. This is not I Am the Fun Blame Monster which may be obvious but should be asserted, and this is not the follow-up to that debut. Logic and Hope, not butting heads like usual, tell me that since the band’s in the studio, their official second album will be revealed within the year. Our Aaron sez, “Menomena = Drums,” and here we have a Menomena surreptitiously burying their lack of fevered percussion under long-winded plays on a basic piano melody or under marathons of punchy woodwinds; some may see this as a footnote, an experiment, a cheeky endeavor. It’s true that Blame Monster’s percussion is amazing, looping and splitting, fuzzing with spunky bombast like a hip-hop producer with hairy palms. Songs like “The Monkey’s Back” move on traditional pop dynamics, Danny Seim’s drumwork building into and breaching through the instruments to dictate when to cheer, when to calm, showing the other parts of the song what to do, albeit manically and with some sweet theatrics. That’s not happening here.

Under An Hour is the collaboration between Portland-based experimental dance company Monster Squad, visual artist Marty Schnapf, and Menomena. Premiering last June at Pica’s annual TBA Festival, performance diagnostics can be found here, including pictures of a big rectangular floor and large digital timers, toned dancer bodies and the three titular subjects found in the track list. Rudimentarily, the subject of the performance involves the momentum created inside a relationship, following stark moments to inevitability. Monster Squad, led by Tahni Holt, has said of its subject, “Relationships build, fall away, and re-build as momentums shift. Crashing moments of intimate conflicts are buttressed by moments or pure, unmitigated communication in a complex interplay of weight exchange, dynamic performance installations, and the all-too-prevalent reality that time is running out.” Heady. Yes, but for a band whose debut has been called “sophomoric” or “goofy,” this is new terrain, and we shouldn’t expect more Blame.

New terrain, but we’re getting the flora without the fauna, the dirt without the soil. This is a soundtrack, and without a potential DVD, Menomena fans are fucked (in the prettiest sense of the word). Still, Monster Squad’s Cliff-Notes involving fracturing paths and histrionic/symbolic weight transference do make sense in the context of Hour’s lumbering instrumental endurance. Opener “Water,” accessible and pregnant for those raised on a healthy diet of Godspeed You Dirty Mogwai!, churns a simple melody through a piano and chimes, hinging on a banjo, then erupts into portentous bass before dropping out, skewering the melody with pillaging synths; strings aching quietly underneath; the melody mounts again, jauntier; strings could be e-bowed guitars could be static; red blips lace the seemingly dissonant melodies into an automaton’s stream of consciousness, a banjo returns organic character to the piece, chimes shimmer, and a violin introduces a new euphonic dominance, familiar but stronger, more confident, before the rest weave the following seven minutes into distracted piano chords and then a brief, violent din. With drums absent, the cadence of the song’s stretched deliverance is motivated by the repetition of the instrumental movements, sent forward not in shifts in time signature (subtle) or changes in key (even subtler), but in the variety of instruments used (not a huge variety, really, but sonically divisive) for a small set of melodies. The intent of the music, creating familial strands that break only to later cross or asymptotically taunt each other, is, as it turns out, a lot easier to catch than Monster Squad’s description. This is a fantastic success.

“Flour” and “Light” maintain the same approach as “Water,” developing a distinct character to shatter into polyrhythmic ephemera and then cast off completely or just twist into a bleak fasces silence. “Flour,” whose beat is designated in wailing, staccato horns, can only match the intensity of its woodwinds with a uniform crashing of cymbals. The symmetry of the track, the longest of the three, is in the placement of three basic melodies. At the beginning and end are Morse code saxes, popping against a shambling and sloppy piano line—following and preceding the extremity horns—which gets close to resembling Death Cab’s “Soul Meets Body,” but thankfully, doesn’t. And in the middle of this, separated by a speckled wall of toots, is a legato, mournful solo, first on piano, and then on baritone sax. Meanwhile, the saxophones leap an octave to fall two; hi-hats stipple engorged metal screaming.

“Light” is e-bowed guitars and then feedback, plastic beep/boops, a glowing caveat, and then a fucking jabbing of drums at ten minutes. If we hadn’t been “robbed” of drums before this point, the entry would not be as exulting as it stands, the crescendo just a gimmick by this point. Instead, the moments when Under An Hour splits its seams, extremely sparse as they may be, develop a sense of traditional poise marred by ravenous urgency. The repeated hooks, the boxing instrumental rhythms, these create a new motivation for the songs to keep going, whereas a barrage of drums would have sufficed in Menomena’s debut. If this is the band’s intent, and if this urgency finds absolution, Under An Hour could be considered the antithesis to Blame Monster, like “Oahu” times negative ten and without the gorgeous female vocals. Whatever the place in Seim’s, Knopf’s, and Harris’s canon this album may eventually fill, I think it can be said that the band performed their duty for Monster Squad swimmingly.

Even so, Hour is not a reinvented Menomena, and the want of “drums” can leave even the most patient bored in “Flour’s” last minutes or exhausted in “Light’s” first seven. We don’t have the whole story here, and, as my buddy Phil Nelson, Menomena SuperFan, sez, “They seem to have a penchant for misinformation.” Apt is what I call it, because underneath the album’s concentric circles and arboreal spread, under the hour, a whole lot is happening; implied instead of injected. When patterns emerge and layers grow translucent, Under an Hour is Menomena at its most rewarding, which seems to me to be the Cookie that proves a band’s going in the right direction. Dom Sinacola :: 12 November 2005 |