”Menomena as a Metaphor for Love” by A. Noah Harrison

Menomena as a In October of 2010, Menomena, my frst girlfriend, and I were all in Atlanta together. Back then, they were a three-piece, and we were building love in spite of our contradictions. Three years and a few days later, Menomena, my second girlfriend, and I were all in Minnesota. By the time we met up, they had lost one, and we had lost one another.

Menomena formed early in the third millennium in Portland, part of the Northwest’s amorphous indie scene. They stand out for their mathy arrangements and eclectic musical structures. Since the first note of the sonically huge debut, I Am the Fun Blame Monster, Menomena have reveled in explorative modes of composition and instrumentation. On top of the complex love affair of guitar and bass, there are the nontraditional vocal hooks, hip-hop pitter-patter percussion of massive dynamic scope, twinkly keyboard lines, and the sporadic ejaculation of baritone sax.

My first girlfriend and I met the previous summer on a school trip to Ireland. In a few very long, pastoral days, our relationship rapidly gained dimension — entirely scriptless but with more role-playing than I was used to … and more sparks than I’d ever known. In those first misty months, she gave me the strong urge to express all of my good traits for her behalf and probably my own as well. One such trait was my infallible music taste, and I soon learned we shared eerily compatible sensibilities. Much like my girlfriend, Menomena entered my periphery from an unexpected place — randomized Internet radio. I quickly shared the discovery with my new companion. And so it was decided Menomena would be our first concert together. It was the first time I’d been with a lady, in most senses of the word, and confusion and enticement burst from every orifice in equal parts.

A few months prior to the show, Menomena released their fourth studio album, Mines, from the plural possessive word, “mine” and probably also the popular explosive. For Mines, Brent, Danny, and Justin recorded hundreds of instrumental loops and vocal clips and meticulously pieced them together like a jigsaw puzzle. The whole process was a mess. As drummer Danny described, “Just when a song became familiar to one of us, the other two members broke it apart again, breaking each others’ hearts along the way. We rerecorded, rebuilt, and ultimately resented each other. And believe it or not, we’re all proud of the results.” My frst girlfriend and I did things in a similar fashion.

It was a testament to power of the individual’s contribution — contributions from which we created a beautiful and coherent work from disparate and faraway parts. Through the craggy dissonance, melodies creep into your ears so gently, you want them to lay eggs in your brain. The relationship at times seemed a dysfunctional collaboration, but so often, it all just ft together in idiosyncratic perfection. Our relationship helped me realize that another person simply being themselves in my general vicinity can bring out a lot in me, and vice versa.

Just after dusk, before the concert, we lay on a small hill. She’d wanted to make out, but I felt nervous about being in public — an inhibition that today I’ve all but forgotten. After some kissing lite, we walked a block to the Variety Playhouse, one of Atlanta’s most respectable musical establishments. Inside, we each bought a t-shirt from — we realized embarrassingly late in the conversation — the band members themselves. When my girlfriend told keyboardist/everything-else-ist Brent her name, he responded, “I love that name. That’s what I’d name my daughter if I ever had a kid, which I won’t.” On my shirt, he even drew an elephant (Exhibit A), contributing to my present naiveté about how my musicals heroes might actually give a shit about a fan like me.

The concert rocked us thoroughly, though I must have been a bit distracted … young love and all. I do remember that their musical chemistry, despite any personal chemistry, knocked off socks. Menomena was captivating with their undulating progressions and addictive grooves.Somehow, our Song became the album’s “Dirty Cartoons,” a rare example of Menomena peeking through the curtain. It was, incidentally, the frst song I’d heard by the band. A melancholic ballad of longing and of comfort in routine, “Dirty Cartoons” starkly contrasts the band’s typical brand of cheeky, nihilist abstractions. My girlfriend always loved the line, “My mind’s a graveyard of unpublished poems.” “Go home,” the song ends, “I’d like to / Go home,” again and again. One of their most clichéd and least experimental moments, but delivered with such candor, you can’t help but believe every word of it. I’ve always found it beautiful.

Halfway through the Mines tour, Brent left the band to pursue other musical endeavors, but I don’t think we noticed. About their loss, multi-instrumentalist Justin said, “We lost a major creative force in Brent, but thankfully, Brent’s not Kurt Cobain, and we’re not Nirvana. Brent’s more like Peter Gabriel, and we’re more like Genesis. And everyone knows how much better Genesis got after that talentless hack Gabriel quit. Waitaminute…” As a Gabriel-era-obsessed Genesis fanatic, I understood the joke all too well.

After the show, I waited around a good while for the band to emerge so I could say hello. I was in unusually high spirits, given multiple recent disappointments. I think inside, I sought some kind of closure. I had a feeling Menomena and I would not likely cross paths again, and I wanted to get a few words in. I ended up chatting with Danny for a couple minutes, delivering my standard incoherent babble about what the band meant to me. He appreciated it. I had him sign my shirt, and he opted to scrawl his name over Brent’s elephant while making a joke at Brent’s expense. The way he told it, I could tell they were still friends. I had Justin sign the shirt, as well as both touring members for good measure, but I can’t remember any words we exchanged. I left the concert alone; my ex had left partway through the show after a single goodbye kiss. This time, I was one to ask. And she was the one to begrudgingly oblige.

My second girlfriend and I never had an official Song, but if we did, it might have been “Plumage,” a simple song within the Menomena canon. Correspondingly, things happened more easily with us than with my first. Every new encounter didn’t contain a riddle, and that was nice. The beauty of our collaboration came from compromise instead of contradiction. A few lines that stand out to me go: “Instead I’m just like everybody else who’s tried / I’ve got to say so long to my ideals / They served me once and served me well / Now they only serve to spin my wheels / I guess I ought to face my fears.” These lines always bothered me. They reminded me that I hadn’t tried, like everyone else had apparently done — that I wasn’t able let go of my obsolete values about love, that I wasn’t able to move on and do something new, at least for a time. Even Menomena was still trying, even if they were no longer navigating the existentialist landscapes of their early days.

Maybe Menomena never had much to do with my love life, but I can’t resist drawing parallels between two sources of such great emotion. When I listen to Menomena these days, the sounds swell in my head so massively, there’s little room for reminders of love lost. But with the right song and the right state of mind, a bit of nostalgia is inevitable.

A few times ’round the sun, and I found myself a Carleton sophomore, still discovering subtle and not-so-subtle features of Mines that I’d somehow missed before. My second girlfriend liked Menomena well enough. I never managed to show her my favorite Menomena moments, but she did often have “Plumage,” the opening track of Mines’ follow-up, stuck in her head.

Menomena released Moms in late 2012 as a tribute to, well, their moms. Danny’s mother died long ago, and Justin had been raised primarily by a single mom. This time, the philosophy was more accessible, as were the songs. And understandably so. While Menomena by no means abandons its churning complexity, emotional depth often trumps composition intrigue. The hooks remain, but they no longer fractal inward quite the way they used to. And having never been especially concerned with the band’s poetic expressions, the lyrics at times seem heavy-handed to me. Danny described Moms’ recording sessions as Menomena’s “most peaceful and collaborative.” Likewise, my new girlfriend and I never struggled much to ft the pieces together. But maybe that’s part of the reason we never reached out full potential.

Days before we were supposed to see Menomena in Minneapolis, she dumped me. But for reasons I cannot begin to explain, insisted she come along anyways. At one point on the ride, I questioned her motivations for attending, almost causing her to jump ship when the bus stopped at the Mall of America. Almost. So for the second time in a row, my Menomena experience was distracted by inescapable feelings of passion, albeit very different ones than before.

With my ex-girlfriend in constant periphery, I tried my hardest to lose myself in the music, but even this became difficult. Simply put, Justin is not as likable a voice for Menomena as Brent was in 2010. While Brent charmed us with his unassuming humor, Justin came off as a bit brash, affirming the feeling lurking inside that something had expired. Brashness aside, what disappointed me most was not their stage presence but their performance. Justin strained to hit the right notes, and Danny, though an immensely talented beatmaker, could not keep Justin and the two touring members in time. To my dismay, the setlist mainly consisted of Moms songs, a possibility that somehow never crossed my mind. So of course they scratched all tracks prominently featuring Brent on vocals and played not a song from the bold and mystifying I am the Fun Blame Monster. What I saw in 2013 was a band trying to move on, to establish an identity outside of Brent’s contributions. But it wasn’t abundantly clear they even wanted to be there.