Every couple of years, a mind-blowing LP comes out on January 23rd, the first release date of the New Year and as a result, it spoils and overshadows the continuous months ahead. Not that it’s any of their faults, but for me at least, I like a nice mid-Autumn release date for an album such as this in order to keep it fresh and unscathed by months of repeats in my stereo for the end of the year review festivities. In sum, this album will be the one you will hate to love all year. Sterile and fractured, Menomena’s Friend and Foe is the cooling agent that fully complements the band’s first album, I Am The Fun Blame Monster.

A few months ago, media-giant Pitchfork broke the stalwart code of silence regarding the much-anticipated sophomore release from the Portland-based trio. The first single off of Friend and Foe — “Wet and Rusting” — was officially released online and eager fans, myself included flew to “The Fork” to get a peak inside the new album. A variation of the familiar and engaging sound of Menomena’s first album I Am The Fun Blame Monster, “Wet and Rusting” was the perfect way to fool and seriously mind-fuck fans trying to extrapolate what to expect from the full album. It begins, “I made you a present/ You’ll never forget it/ And when you unravel/ The secrets will travel”. How true Menomena, how true. The rest of the album is a completely unexpected 90-degree turn from a band that seems to have an infinite amount of inspiration and creativity. “Wet and Rusting” drew the blinds on many an eye so that when January 23rd came along and Friend and Foe was released, all expectations were shattered, forcing the listener to approach it with unassuming and unbiased ears. I argue that without this cleansing of the palette, this album would be utterly unappreciated by long-time fans. Friend and Foe, Menomena’s first for Barsuk Records, is easily one of the top albums in the past six months and will be difficult to be beseeched as my favorite album of this upcoming year. Shitty timing, but great luck.

Menomena has an outside-the-box creative process that enables them to make significantly intricate and involving music with the bare-boned roster of only three musicians. Created and programmed by band member Brent Knopf, the Digital Looping Recorder, or Deeler stores live recordings of various instruments and loops them, adding other instruments as they go along. Drummer Danny Sein explains, “First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of headphones. We then take turns passing a single mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instrument, while another one of us will lay down a short improvised riff over the click track. We usually start with the drums. Once the drums begin looping, we throw on some bass, piano, guitar, bells, sax, or whatever other sort of noisemaker happens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process democratic, which is the only way we can operate”. Once an outline has been created by Deeler, the band then learns how to perform it live. The end results are songs that feel so symphonic and labor intensive with the opposing tightness and consistency of a collaboration between a few talented artists. The interesting thing about Friend and Foe, in regards to Deeler, is the totally new facet in which Menomena has allocated its use in the final product. Their debut LP I Am The Fun Blame Monster, uses Deeler as the upfront and visible primary engine of the album’s brilliance whereas Friend and Foe hides evidence of Deeler’s tracks with layer-upon-layer of atmosphere-building sound.

The most notable aspect of this album is the group’s seemingly overnight sense of artistic maturity. Much of the album’s tone and atmosphere can be described as a perfect score for a Tim Burton film. Missing from this album is all the guitar-led exuberant youthfulness of IATFBM embodied in upbeat rockers like “Trigga Hiccups” and “Cough Coughing”. Replacing them are wistful piano and vocal-heavy “Air Aid” and “Boyscout’n”. Airy, haunting and full of gloom, Friend and Foe resembles Spencer Krug’s Sunset Rubdown LP, but with more emphasis on melding and entangling instrumental relationships between the sounds instead of creating gaping distances between them. I guess they have Deeler to thank for that. But now I’m leading towards generalizations. The difficult part of trying to write this review is creating a cohesive and straightforward piece about an album that is anything but. This album is all over the place. Less than a solidly conceived album but more than a collection of ideas and experiments, Friend and Foe lies oddly somewhere in between. This does cause an initial reluctance or obstruction to actively engage the album but is well worth the time-consuming commitment to get past.

Just to forewarn, there are considerable hints of Menomena’s contemporaries on Friend and Foe, most easily heard are TV On The Radio (“Weird” and “The Pelican”) and according to my esteemed colleague Tyler, Dire Straits too (admittedly a stretch). The best songs on the album, however, are the ones that arrive naturally and escape the excesses of Menomena’s drive to overproduce and overcomplicate matters. “Muscle’n Flo” proves an appropriate opener to the album with Beach House-esque slide guitars and enough momentum to propel you past the more somber songs after it. “Rotten Hell”, whose video is currently used in an advert on M2, is a sing-songy ballad that sounds like The Beatles on an array of reds and other fanciful downers. Mostly just bass and vocals, “Ghostship” is simple, blunt and no doubt politically driven, “Her majesty sails across the sea/ And there’s a new theory for each passing week/ For each covered up case of double speak/ And I’ve got a feeling we’re counting sheep/ We’re in over our heads/ This analogy only fits when I bow and call you majesty”. Yea, take that GW, Cheney and the ever-delightful/scary Condi.

What has been commonly interpreted as “shortcomings” on Friend and Foe are in fact some of the best aspects of the album. The album shows Menomena’s talent to make a dynamic and stereophonic album that is as ideologically fragmented as it is musically complete from start to finish. It also proves Menomena’s mastery of the Deeler program and showcases just how far they can go with it and the seemingly infinite possibilities of its use. Most bands with an acclaimed debut album suffer from the ever-present “Sophomore Slump”. Luckily for Menomena, the only slump on this album from the beauty and originality of its predecessor is the mood and the tempo.

Note: For those interested, a key intermediary insight into the origins of this album’s orchestral sound can be found in Under An Hour, the group’s instrumental score for Portland-based dance troop Monster Squad, released in 2003.

Second note: This is a headphones album. Car/home stereos do not do it justice.

Menomena Official Site
Barsuk Records