Menomena
Mines
Barsuk Records
This “experimental” Portland, Oregon band has a lot of great things going for it, and this album showcases it all: the looped rhythm tracks are awesome, the singing has potential for greatness—most of the vocal tracks hover somewhere between Peter Gabriel and a more nasally Ozzy Osbourne, with a touch of Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme—and the production and arrangement on Mines is truly masterful. Menomena are also graphically gifted, if their CD packaging materials are any indication, and by the music you can tell that they probably put on a great live show. Their lyrics are interesting and occasionally even poetic.
The one thing that’s hard to get past is that the Flaming Lips were doing almost exactly this in 1995, and to be offering it now as some amazing new thing is, well, a decade late and a Euro short. —Tom Sturm
Jane Monheit
Home
(Emarcy/Umgd)
Jane Monheit’s eighth CD is a collection of jazz vocal standards, but this time she picks some lesser-known tunes from the Great American Songbook. Rodgers and Hart’s rarely recorded “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You” is a perfect example.After a lead-in from pianist (and husband) Michael Kanan, bass player Neal Miner and drummer Rick Montalbano set the pace for her bouncy, teasing vocal.
Three songs are normally associated with male vocalists Joe Williams (“There’s a Small Hotel”) and Fred Astaire. The latter has been a favorite of Monheit’s for years, and she turns in a brilliantly phrased ballad version of “Isn’t It A Lovely Day?” Home is the first CD to find Monheit producing and singing, and she is more than up to the task. Guest appearances by guitarist John Pizzarelli and violinist Mark O’Connor add color and depth to an album that’s a model for small-combo jazz. —Jeffrey Siegel
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
Before Today
(4AD)
Ariel Pink may be an unlikely candidate for the most influential musician of the past decade, but his lo-fi albums of reconfigured ’70s and ’80s soft rock and radio pop have birthed genres from chillwave to hypnogogic pop and profoundly shaped today’s rampant retrophilia. He’s returned after a lengthy absence with his first album recorded in a proper studio.
Fans have worried that his charming pastiches wouldn’t signify without the layers of sonic fuzz, but the crystalline Before Today is his most enjoyable and accomplished work to date. It runs the gamut stylistically, recalling everything from early PIL to Christopher Cross while still sounding like Ariel Pink. The sunny rocking “Bright Lit Blue Skies” and insidiously catchy “Round and Round” are the instant hits, but the entire album is a testament to his ability to reconfigure the past into beguiling new shapes and deliver strangely affecting thrills. —Jeff Jackson
