I have to give Menomena credit. When they emerged, they built all their songs using their own software. The approach worked really well, resulting in a wildly creative debut LP, I Am the Fun Blame Monster. But the band refused to let the process become the point, and seven years later, on their third album (not counting Under an Hour), you have to listen carefully to even detect the modular, mix-and-match method the band still employs in the studio. Mines, more than any of their previous work, really sounds like the trio did as much conventional songwriting as jamming, looping, and editing.
It's a direction Menomena hinted at on 2007's Friend and Foe, but here they seem to have evolved into a band much more at ease with itself, and consequently a lot less preoccupied with blowing your head off every eight bars. Granted, the hyperactive creativity of their first two albums was part of charm and excitement, but the low-key Mines is a welcome change of pace. While it's less immediate, with time it reveals a wealth of details and surprises on par with the band's other albums. Lyrically, the band seems particularly concerned with carrying on in spite of vulnerability, inadequacy, and age, sounding all the more unsettled amid the confident music.
In fact, I've never spent so much time poring over the lyrics to a Menomena record. The album's loudest, most uptempo song, "Taos", features a charging chorus built around the line, "I'm not the most cocksure guy," plunked right into a narrative of mutual, drunk seduction-- the narrator keeps voicing his doubts even as his actions are confident and even aggressive. Elsewhere, they've applied the modular approach they use for their instruments to the voices, finding a multitude of ways to harmonize, combine, and recombine the "and nothing sounds appealing" refrain from "Tithe". And the instrumental touches are often clever-- there's a little sax figure that pretty much makes the whole rhythm track of "Bote", and the chunks of ascending piano that pop up in just the right places on "Oh Pretty Boy, You're Such a Big Boy" keep the song moving every time it hits a pause. Brent Knopf's mini synth solo is a welcome surprise, too.
One of the things that makes Menomena such a consistently great band on record is that, regardless of how they're arranging their sounds, they know how to balance them in a mix so that the listener can feel the spatial relationships between them. There's a lot of room for your ear to roam on Mines, and it reveals itself over the course of a few listens as a very satisfying album worth exploring and revisiting. I spent one spin just focusing on Danny Seim's drums-- they seem to have picked up their drum recording technique from Led Zeppelin or the Flaming Lips, and the beats on this record consequently sound huge. It works surprisingly well for a relatively modest album that leaves the high-concept art behind in favor of a simple poster and works within the band's already established range rather than stabbing out into new territory.
