Pitchfork

There's hardly a bolder statement you could make about your band's penchant for innovation than writing software specifically to aid your own distinctive compositional style. This is what Brent Knopf did; his program is called Deeler, and it allows his band, Menomena, to improvise short ideas and use them as the building blocks for broad, loop-based compositions which they then learn to play live. The method borrows most obviously from hip-hop and glitch, and you can pick up slight traces of both in the band's sound, but this music is distinctly pop-oriented, and reasonably traditional where its core melodies are concerned.

The album opens with an accelerated, processed drum roll and then busts out into the aggressive rhythmic assault of "Cough Coughing". Drummer Danny Seim and bassist/guitarist Justin Harris can cut it up like nobody's business, and for some large portions of the song, it's just them sparsely making a groove happen, with vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Knopf's quivering piano occasionally rising like the ghost of an old ambient house record. The song's midsection is a series of head-spinning leaps and cuts through myriad textures, with Knopf resting on a tense piano melody.

But it's not all highwire-act dynamics and ADD jams: I Am the Fun Blame Monster also brims with mood, a dark energy and sense of direction permeating every song. "The Late Great Libido" is a perfect testament to this, with its rivers of bubbling piano, droning sax and frenetic drums. The track is a not-too-distant cousin of Blur, but it does things in ways most bands would never dream of, bursting in the middle with thundering guitar melodies, building itself up in increments, snapping to silence and back, and sending each verse up differently than the one before. Harmonies float in on beautiful beds of piano in one instant, chase away tinkling glockenspiels the next, and then retreat altogether, yielding the field to pianos and heavily delayed drums. Elements you thought had disappeared for good resurface in new contexts with new meanings. You'll never get it all on the first listen, but there'll be no shaking that melody; Menomena could have a huge hit on their hands-- at least at the college level-- if this track finds its way into the right mitts.

Surprises like the ones in "The Late Great Libido" are packed tightly into every song: guitars crash in only to anticipate silence, pianos weave through minefields of modular percussion, and Knopf's pleasing tenor runs a gauntlet of processing and fading to deliver what are fundamentally very basic melodies. "E. Is Stable" springs from a simple guitar line, repeatedly building up and breaking down, while "Strongest Man in the World" feels light until Knopf's hand reaches to the bottom octave of the piano and anchors the song to a sinister bass figure.

Essentially, the band's process of building from small blocks enables them to put endless variations on each basic section of their songs-- introducing a pulsing organ and a plaintive piano separately, for instance, and then heaving them together in multiple combinations later in the song. Even the vocals are, by and large, just another module to be played with, disappearing for minutes at a time and reemerging with choruses just as you begin to grow accustomed to their absence.

Suffice to say, Menomena are a hugely creative band, and with I Am the Fun Blame Monster, they've managed to make an album that's extremely accessible yet entirely unconventional. The thing that drew me to the album in the first place was the crazy artwork, which features a flipbook of four photos and very little other information, save that the disc's title is an anagram for "the first Menomena album." It's just one more subtlety that exemplifies the depth of detail apparent on this record.