Lenny Kravitz has too much going on. The 47-year-old multiplatinum rocker is hitting the road to promote his ninth album, “Black and White America,” which was released last year.The fourth album, “Mines,” from the Portland, Ore., trio Menomena comes 3 1/2 years after its last disc, the brilliantly thorny “Friend and Foe,” a minor breakthrough in the indie scene.
The band has alluded to “brutal disagreements” and “failed marriages” in explaining the delay, and, fittingly, “Mines” sounds toiled over. It’s an identity crisis record.
This is partly because of the fractured way Menomena works: its three members all sing, they use a self-created looping software program to winnow hundreds of loops into songs, and they play some combination of guitar, saxophone and keyboards with herky-jerky, propulsive percussion. A Menomena song is typically composed of minor chords and melancholy, vacillating between sinister knottiness and sensual melody.
“Mines” is uneven, but it’s exhilaratingly unpredictable. It hardly seems the same band, going from the aggressive fuzz and twang of “TAOS” to, two tracks later, the sentimental ballad “Dirty Cartoons.”
After eight searching, varied songs, “Mines” culminates with the operatic, dystopian “Five Little Rooms” and its warmer, anthemic counterpart, “Sleeping Beauty” – the light at the end of Menomena’s bipolar tunnel.
