Tracks
Menomena: "Five Little Rooms"
(2010)
By Andrew Hall | 5 June 2010
When I interviewed Brent Knopf last December and saw Menomena perform a one-off, things were not looking good concerning their followup to 2007’s stellar Friend and Foe. He had just finished up the first round of touring behind his solo project, Ramona Falls, and expressed frustration at the fact that Mines wasn’t done yet, that he was still uncertain as to how long it would be (it would run somewhere between 35 and 140 minutes based on what the three of them each wanted). More distressing than that was the fact that the band played two new songs, both of which felt painfully low-key, almost unfinished. “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the band’s exclusive release for Record Store Day, again, didn’t do much.
Fortunately, Mines is proof that I was wrong, the band was uncomfortably between records last December (and their live performances, now augmented by Joe Haege of 31Knots and Tu Fawning, will likely be able to convey these songs far more effectively than they could as a trio), and that their new songs don’t suck. “Five Little Rooms” is a more than adequate teaser; it’s tense, dark, a little menacing, and, like all Menomena songs, probably about jealousy, betrayal, and passive-aggression. It’s a quiet-verses/big-chorus thing, with the quiet verses underpinned by an ascending line played first on saxophone, then on some sort of synthesizer, with the chorus built around Knopf’s clean piano, that surrounded by stereo pans and some of the crunchiest guitar work the band’s ever presented.
Even more striking is how inexplicably effective the lyrical turns are here, especially against the relentlessly cartoony horn-synth skronk; the song opens on the line “This is a play that takes place in a freezer” and ends on “Hung on a pole right next to a McDonalds / In a suburban shopping mall / At half mast again / Between shootings.” I’m not normally a fan of imagery like this, or quoting entire blocks of lyrics in reviews, but there is real dread and tension, born out of a very specific kind of anxiety, within Mines. The band has finally learned how to express, through their music, the inner turmoil that holds them together. And such may prove to be their forthcoming album’s most vital quality.