Menomena is a curiosity.
Their name comes from an episode of The Muppets … maybe. They record their music with a computer program written by their guitarist. They’ve written almost as much copy for the Willamette Week‘s music blog as the paper’s staff, and they’ve been conspicuously absent from their most recent videos due to “collective ugliness.”
While facts such as these fail to produce any kind of cohesive thesis about the existence of Menomena–or their subsequent popularity–they do provide a good entryway into a band that has successfully found a way to live on its own terms.
Menomena played their first show in 2001 at the now-defunct club The Meow Meow. Members Brent Knopf (guitar), Justin Harris (bass, sax) and Danny Seim (drums) launched into that performance with a primal form of the off-kilter funk that has since become their trademark. One-third electronic trickery and two-thirds driving rhythmic ambiance, their music was a fair representation of its members’ curious sensibilities.
“I was hoping to just play a few shows around Portland and stick to my Kinko’s day job,” said Seim of his initial attitude toward the band.
It was this initial lack of pressure that allowed the group to develop a sound incorporating the intensity of their artistic commitment with the relaxed fluidity inherent in the trio’s interpersonal rapport.
Aided by a steadily increasing array of loop pedals, saxophones and myriad other noisemakers, the boys started bringing together the elements that would come to identify their music. This process is aided by Deeler, a looping/recording software program written by Knopf, which is in large part responsible for the mutating circular compositions of Menomena’s albums.
“It’s impossible not to get carried away in the recording environment for us,” Seim said. “We do everything ourselves, so there’s no looming studio budgets overhead. So it’s like, ‘Multitrack 400 different vocal harmonies right here? Why not?’ … It’s hard to tell where we’d end up without these building blocks layering upon one another. If anything, our approach keeps us from veering too far away from the source, which is the three of us all constructing these loops together.”
The generation of such expansive curios soon became the band’s M.O., and after several self-distributed demos, Menomena released their debut full-length through Portland-based Film Guerrero Records. I Am the Fun Blame Monster! came out in 2003 and soon gained national prominence through a combination of merit and dumb luck.
An anagram for, quite simply, “The First Menomena Album,” I Am the Fun Blame Monster! was a pleasant surprise for almost everyone who listened to it, including the godhead reviewers at Pitchfork Media, who afforded the album “Best New Music” status and turned what was then an obscure Portland trio into a nationally viable indie-rock act.
Seim, having “never heard of” Pitchfork at the time, had sent the album in on a lark, and the band was almost as surprised as anyone else that they’d been given such fawning attention.
For the next four years, Menomena cut their teeth on a grueling schedule of cross-country tours intermittently mixed with day jobs and side projects, leaving little in the way of downtime. By the time Knopf, Harris and Seim came around to the task of recording their sophomore album, the group had crisscrossed the country multiple times, released an EP in conjunction with Portland dance troupe Monster Squad and somewhere in the mix found time to sign with Seattle-based Barsuk Records. The label would help vault the group to even further recognition.
Friend and Foe had scarcely surpassed its January 2007 release date before the critical community unleashed a deluge of commendations for its quirky, but approachable songwriting. With Barsuk’s marketing capabilities backing up what was undoubtedly the band’s most refined release to date, Menomena broke clean into the higher realms of indie-rock notoriety, securing a berth on multiple year-end “Best Of” lists and a Grammy nod for their cover art.
Four years ago, Menomena seemed an unlikely candidate for Portland’s next breakout band, but now that the music world is affording them such attention, it’s proving difficult to disparage a group that puts such obvious enjoyment into the music they make. Fueled by this enjoyment, Menomena’s members have only seen their fortunes expand since the release of Friend and Foe, taking tentative steps into their future releases with Barsuk and a growing American and European audience.
“We’re still very much in our infancy in Europe,” Seim said. “We’ve done three tours over there as opposed to maybe 10 over here. So there’s still a ways to go.”
Menomena is in the process of recording for a release later this year. For a band that’s trying to put “Making Music” as its number-one occupation, this follow-up record will be an important test of their ability to maintain the creative energy they have displayed thus far. If the past is any indicator, holding on to their momentum should be a realistic prospect for the trio.
Menomena’s story is exemplary of a pattern that is becoming endemic of Portland-based rock groups: a band that seems too obscure to net anything more than a cult following is catapulted by dumb luck and self-determination to a level of prominence not even they planned on attaining. Without a doubt, Menomena is one of Portland’s best bands of the last several years, both live and on record, and their success is in many ways a microcosm of the kind of environment Portland has grown to foster.
“It’s always tough to reference any particular Portland band, because it’s impossible to name them all,” Seim said. “You name one, and there’s a hundred more you’re forgetting. That’s probably been the biggest change that I’ve noticed in the community [over the last few years]. The sheer number of creative people here seems to double every year, if not every month.”
While this means that more people are competing for a shrinking number of dollars in the creative market, it has also allowed this city to become a place where bands like Menomena can thrive. The reason Menomena has been so hard to pin down as a group is because they are honestly disinterested in fitting into anyone’s preconceived notions of what a band should be–even their own.