Alt rock stars from my home town
of Portland, Oregon, I must have really
liked these guys. I have three of their
albums on CD and the last studio album
they recorded in 2012 on vinyl. Oddly,
like many things that I love for a time
and then shelve indefinitely, I can’t for
the life of me remember a single song
or even accurate descriptors of what
they sounded like, or why I loved them.
I am on a rediscovery mission, then, with
this last record of theirs, Moms.
Oh yeah. From minute one, it comes
back to me. How these two guys ever
performed this stuff is a total mystery
to me. I never saw them live, but the
story is that this duo performed all the
instruments live, no backing tracks,
drum set, guitars, horns, keyboards, bass,
and a shit-ton of vocals. They could could
be grungy and heavy, and then quiet, epic
and anthemic, arty and chamber pop-like,
in fact, if there’s one single thing that is
consistent about Menomena is that they
are not consistent, at least sonically or
instrumentally. They dabble, prog-like,
with odd meters, their production
choices are surprising, and their lyrics
are smart, often serious, like on this
record: “Heavy are the branches hanging
from my fucked up family tree.” Kinda
dark, but man, these two guys made
great records, sophisticated, varied,
complex, and deep. This Moms album
is worthy of repeated and close listenings,
and I’m saying that (or writing this) as
I’m only half way through this double
record. Side C gets a little weird and trippy,
less melodically accessible, rhythmically
wild, kind of Pink Floyd adjacent, but it’s
still groovy. The album’s closer, taking up
the entire last side of the album at a stingy
10:11 run time, is entirely just
atmospheric, the kind of thing you’d hear
in a science-fiction film as the cameras
hover about the planet’s surface and
its spooky topography. And yet, somehow,
ten minutes and eleven seconds of this
nonsense nevertheless remains an interesting
listen. Go figure. I’m in. And I want to hear
these Menomena guys more often, and I
hope they’re still making music in their
challenging and rewarding way into this
second or third decade into their existence.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Moms, Barsuk Records, 2012, double black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 