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.