With Menomena, you always get a total package. Their first album, 2003’s I Am the Fun Blame Monster, came with a hand-assembled flip book, complete with moving anagrams. The vinyl edition took the packaging a step further: It folded up into an origami monster with a moving mouth. Their second outing, a minimalist ballet score cutely titled Under an Hour, came in a stark, mostly white container that looked a lot like the music it contained. And Friend and Foe, their third, has possibly the most brilliantly executed cover art of the decade.
Illustrated by Craig Thompson of Blankets fame, the front cover has eight possible permutations, four when the CD is in the case, and four when it’s in the player (it’ll be there a lot)—and that’s not counting all of the slight variations you can get by rotating the disc when it’s in the tray. The drawings—a hellish, humorous freak universe on their own—are punched with holes to reveal other worlds behind them, full of characters, snippets of lyrics, and the record-fetching dog from the Barsuk logo.
Most cover art frankly isn’t even worth talking about in the CD age, but this is so unique that it warrants deeper discussion than I can give it here. And speaking of the total package, Menomena deliver just as spectacularly on record. While Under an Hour could rightly have been seen as a detour or stopgap after Blame Monster, Friend and Foe follows through on the potential of their unique sound, proving their wildly great debut was no fluke.
Menomena don’t even give you time to doubt them. Their signature modular pop is at its most effective on opener “Muscle’n Flo.” Crashing drums lead you in, dropping out after just seconds in favor of a pulsating bassline and the prosodically delivered line, “In the morning I stumble towards the mirror.” From this sparse beginning, the music blossoms with brimming intricacy, adding slashing guitar as the drums kick back in with a vengeance. The song is a total rollercoaster, eventually collapsing into a quiet interlude that sets up a brilliant moment where an organ figure that had been a barely noticeable background component suddenly rises to the fore and leads into a beautiful, floating passage of impassioned vocal harmonies. And that’s just one of dozens of ingenious, spine-tingling details offered on the album.
The band’s technique of building songs from improvised loops arranged with custom software yields bigger, more developed compositions and stronger songwriting than on records past. “Wet and Rusting” is one of their most conventionally memorable songs to date, but also one of their most interestingly varied, as the textures that lie beneath the vocals constantly shift. It places the same rushing piano passage over two completely different rhythm tracks and makes it sound amazing both ways. “The Pelican” is a relentless stomp, nearly matched a few tracks later by “Weird,” whose intense beat and ominous low-end groan slides through a tricky meter.
With the exception of the majestic, fractured pop of “My My,” the back half of the album is a great deal more abstract than the front, as it was on their debut. “Evil Bee” revolves around the refrain, “O, to be a machine/O, to be wanted/O, to be useful,” and backs up the sentiment with strangely mechanical sounds that seem to have been created by processing recorded drum hits—the bassline is crazy and intensely melodic, and they use the same vocal phrase about five different ways over all manner of instrumentation, including a heavy baritone sax riff and an fluidly ascendant, synth-saturated buildup.
Once you’ve listened through a couple of times, it’s stunning how many clever and exciting moments stick with you—music this full of ideas, sections and material can come across as overstuffed, but this feels just right almost everywhere. Their previous two albums worked because of their stripped, immediate simplicity; Friend and Foe works just as well moving away from that approach and shows dimensions of the band—especially in the vocal department—that weren’t apparent before. In fact, the biggest concern one might come away from Friend and Foe with is whether the band can top it next time.
