More thoughts on ‘Mines’

Mines is a cre­ative achieve­ment on a level with TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Moun­tain. Their past col­lec­tions may have proved Menomena’s tech­ni­cal skill and abun­dant imag­i­na­tion, but their lat­est effort ought to pro­pel them to the very fore­front of inde­pen­dent Amer­i­can music. -BBC

Mines is the most coher­ent expres­sion of their aes­thetic yet, sculpt­ing their immensely intri­cate, sump­tu­ously lay­ered and dis­arm­ingly arranged sound­scapes into new forms which are as mem­o­rable as they are reward­ing.  Big things beckon. — Time Out London

The fact is, I really want you to like Menom­ena. In par­tic­u­lar their lat­est, and third LP, Mines. I could go on and on about the songs, the amaz­ing com­po­si­tion, the intri­cate sounds and lay­ers they incor­po­rate, about the fact that this is a band that uses a com­puter pro­gram one of the mem­bers invented him­self and not just the set­ting on a syn­the­sizer of some for­mer piano prodigy who gave up his/her dreams to pur­sue a life in chill­wave. But no, this is an album, a band, you must hear for yourself…Hidden behind the mask of a starkly intri­cate and stun­ning fifty-four plus min­utes, from the first track to the last, there is a relat­able, hon­est por­trayal of a band at this point in their lives and careers. The con­ver­gence of musi­cal skill and per­sonal emo­tions – not sen­ti­ments of vague gen­er­al­i­ties and non­sen­si­cal bom­bast – achieve that most elu­sive of rock adjec­tives: gen­uine­ness. - Aquar­ium Drunkard

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