Menomena - Friend and Foe

It’s not often I get the chance to review an album before it’s already been discussed at PitchforkMedia.com (Editor’s Note: A review for Friend or Foe appeared at Pitchfork on Thursday, after this review was written. You can view it here) or The Onion’s A.V. Club. It’s also not often that I get handed a pre-release from one of my favorite bands, in this case Menomena. All in all, I feel like an indie kid in a vinyl store.

Friend and Foe is the immediate follow-up to Menomena’s experimental Under An Hour, which featured three pristinely rendered instrumentals clocking in over 17 minutes each. More accurately, Friend and Foe is the proper follow-up to Menomena’s debut, I Am the Fun Blame Monster!, which took the indie music world by storm in 2003.

I’ll come out and say it. Friend and Foe is brilliant, the third and best glimpse so far at a band that is breaking ground and laying waste to all competitors. With Friend and Foe, Menomena have placed themselves an inch or two below the very best bands working today, and they’re only that low due to inexperience.

Menomena have the unique ability to take progressive sounds and turn them into catchy gems where most bands ignore the pop. Nowhere is this more evident than on the album opener, “Muscle ‘n’ Flo.” The opening strains are reminiscent of Fun Blame Monster’s best track, “E Is Stable,” but the second verse blows the doors off. The songs’ primary strength is its theme, the story of humdrum existence (“Make a call/Make some cash/Make your mark/Make it last”) that is suddenly broken two minutes in by a rush of organ and a bridge so exquisite and beautiful that it can only be the story of conversion. I hesitate to make that claim, as I have no concrete evidence of the band’s stance on faith, but the lyrics back me up. If nothing else, you need to hear this song.

While “Muscle ‘n’ Flo” is an early favorite for “Best Song of the 2007”, one song doesn’t make an album.

Not to worry…Brent Knopf, Danny Seim and Justin Harris have more than enough here to keep a listener enthralled. “The Pelican” hammers nerves with a piano-punctuated yelp. The song was familiar…it was the most recognizable cut from Menomena’s recent show at the Doug Fir. From there, “Wet and Rusting” keeps pace, bringing in a strummed acoustic guitar and dancing over the chorus, “It’s hard to take risks/With a pessimist.”

From there, “Air Aid” and “Weird” are perfect album songs: tracks you won’t skip, but which lack the immediate poignancy of the first three tracks. The heart of the tracks is often baritone saxophone groans, which add chilling texture. “Rotten Hell” is the closest the album gets to a ballad, a gorgeous Brit-pop tune and another gold brick that makes this album great. “My My” brings back the organ from “Muscle ‘n’ Flo,” and “Boyscoutin’” brings in a hearty whistle.

From there, the album slows down a bit, but not before the stomach-punch urgency of “Ghostship”. In fact, my only complaint is that the album’s closer, “West” lacks the power of “Ghostship,” its immediate predecessor.

Friend and Foe is the showcase of a brilliant band in their earliest days. I Am the Fun Blame Monster! was a stunning debut, Under An Hour was a properly experimental middle project, and Friend and Foe is the next logical step, the breathtaking result of a band becoming the best at what they do.

To purchase a physical copy of this album, click Barsuk Records. For a digital copy, click on the button below: