MENOMENA /// I AM THE FUN BLAME MONSTER /// FILMGUERRO RECORDS ///

Much was made of Deeler, the computer program that Menomena's Brent Knopf invented to facilitate the band's peculiar method of composition. Deeler allows Menomena to manipulate small bits of recorded music into dark pop collages, which they then learn to replicate with live instrumentation, the series of formal transliterations rendering the music strikingly strange. The new album's title, I Am The Fun Blame Monster, an anagram for "The First Menomena Album," mirrors the sonic anagrams to be found on the disc. Like modern poets who integrate Googled phrases and e-mail spam into their compositions, Menomena treat technology as a tool for formal mediation and an expression of its era.

Aesthetically, Menomena is closest to the sculpted popscapes of the Beta Band. But, "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the facile comparison misses the mark. Unremittingly murky, yet buoyant and spacious, I Am the Fun Blame Monster is an exercise in careful embellishment and expansive space, as it simmers and rustles through nine monumentally stark pop dioramas. After deconstructing their ideas, Menomena succeed where all the king's men failed by restoring Humpty Dumpty not to his original form, but by piecing him together into fantastic, seamless shapes.

The opening drum salvo and bouncing bass of "Cough Coughing" surge and abate along with the wafting vocal harmony, which gives way into a climbing piano figure, before the song's reconfigurations become too infinitesimal to chart. Like most Menomena songs, it begins as a living entity that abruptly perishes before the ghosts of its components begin a game of King of the Mountain atop its corpse. The pleasant, mid-range vocals and staccato bass of "The Late Great Libido" are made livelier by the entrance of fleet piano arpeggios and a doleful saxophone lead. And "Strongest Man in the World" substitutes ambience for urgency, with the clamoring minor-key siren of its opening chords and crashing cymbals, interleaved with glacial piano / vocal interludes that seethe in a quietude emphasized by the harsh aural environments bookending them. Imagine The RZA splicing together sleek beats from the detritus of '70s pop radio, or The Flaming Lips remixed by Prefuse 73, and you'll begin to approximate the distinct milieu of Menomena, whose esoteric leanings and attention to detail render I Am the Fun Blame Monster the most original yet cohesive sonic experiment this year.

Brian Howe