When You Unravel the Secret Will Travel

Menomena - Friend or Foe

Barsuk; 2007

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I've dabbled with audio mixing software a bit - everything has blended and congealed from simple drum-machine programs and audio mixing software to something between the two. Programs where you can create beats, mix in found and recorded sounds, compose melodies using sampled audio waves controlled by virtual synthesizers represented by virtual keyboards and virtual buttons on virtual grids to create virtual symphonies. When playing around with wonderous software, and when listening to others's music, I often notice two common problems: 1) everything I hear sounds like it could have been mixed on a 16-bit Super Nintendo, and 2) it is too easy to get into a 'drag and drop' frame of mind, creating slightly disjointed pieces lacking the unity and cohesive nature of an actually practiced and performed song.

This album has gotten a lot of hype in the last two weeks or so. Also, it's tough to find a review of Menomena that doesn't include a description of how the music is created - the band uses mixing software to compose songs, then learns those songs on instruments before recording them. This description seems like a gimmick, and at first I thought it was lazy criticism, as the discussion of the creation of music can easily distract from the music itself.

But that's it; that's really the best way to describe the feel of this album. The drumbeats are actually performed and recorded, not mixed on a beat machine. But they are often influenced by that skippy, counter-intuitive nature of techno beats. Layered melodies and counter-melodies come across as their own units, adding layers but not often playing or reacting off of each other like well-recorded live music. Somewhat random instruments layer over each other, adding more and more sounds that seem more plopped in than cohesive and integral parts of the recordings.

But the result isn't bad at all; in fact, it's very smart and thought-provoking. The melodies work well together and moods shift beautifully through each song and throughout the album as a whole. The piles and piles of sound that come and go actually lend to an overall feel. You know how you feel when listening to a really well produced Beck recording, where everything seem piled on and random waves of noise seem to fall together just right? It's something like that (as opposed to a bad Beck recording, where piles of noise get all jumbled up and are just, well, noisy).

So they brag of creating songs on a computer, then learning them and performing them. But that really isn't the end of the story. The thing that critics seem to miss is that these songs aren't live performances at all. They are clearly the work of hours of studio magic - weeks and months of recording different parts, different beats, different sounds, then mixing them back together. The live performances might be a cohesive interpretation of songs they mixed from found sounds, but this end result is just as remixed as the music was in the compositional phase.

The majority of music produced today is just that - a remix of itself - bits of recorded sounds snipped apart, twisted by processing, and put back together in a final, produced manner. This record makes you aware of this fact, in a most beautiful, moody, though-provoking way. I will certainly be watching this great band for years to come.

I never thought a moment spoke so well

Secret Machines - Ten Silver Drops
Reprise; 2006

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It was sort of coincedence that I discovered this band. I think it had something to do with the persistant suggestion of Amazon's recommendations department combined with the fact that I saw it on the shelf at some music store (I want to sound cool. It was actually a Barnes & Noble), picked it up, bought it, took it home, and fell in love with the band. It just so happened, and I didn't discover this until much later, that one of the members of Secret Machines was in Tripping Daisy, a band I deeply mourn and often pine for.

Layered, dense and emotional. Medatative, and anything but rushed. The tracks on this album are long but don't meander much. They carry their somewhat ambivalent emotional weight (moreso than their previous efforts) without falling into sentimentalism. There's this seductive, almost trancey cohesion throughout the whole piece, and it really manages to pull the listener in.

What I don't get about this, what I don't get about most of popular music, in fact, is that very few people out there are listening to this music. Secret Machines are right there in major-label obscurity. What's up with that? I mean yeah, the songs are sort of long, but I never thought that was a good excuse for obscurity. They're way better than the mass of popular music. In fact, they're way better than the other similarly themed, slightly off-kilter acts you can catch on the more artsy radio stations out there. Plus, what with the power of the internet and all, why is good music like this still floating on the boundaries of the musical world?

I mean, I can see why some bands I write about will remain in relative obscurity: Shellac, Brainiac, To My Surprise, The Swans and the Angels of Light. Yeah, I get how some of that stuff just isn't for mass consumption. But this really is listenable. I mean, it's catchy and melodic and sort of rocks, sort of.

Are my tastes bad? Am I really that out of touch? It's true that I've never really gotten popular music in general, but sometimes it just sort of confuses me.