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Portland indie-rock band Menomena is nearly as famous for its interpersonal squabbles as its flawless five-album run from 2003 to 2012, so it’s a relief to hear how cheerful its three multi-instrumentalists sound as they convene around the phone after a rehearsal.
Their biggest disagreement for the time being is how many times they’ve practiced for their upcoming shows. Danny Seim says eight times. Brent Knopf guesses six. A bark comes from the background: Justin Harris’ dog, Solomon. Knopf translates: “It sounds like just one!”
The band’s two shows Aug. 10 and 11 at Revolution Hall are their first in a decade, and they’ll be playing their 2003 debut, I Am the Fun Blame Monster, all the way through in tandem with a limited-edition vinyl reissue. These are the only two dates the band has scheduled, but Menomena released an EP of older songs in April called The Insulation and has been slowly releasing expanded digital versions of its back catalog.
“Once our record-label friends learned we were gonna do the show, they were like, hey, do you have any B-sides and rarities that we could share with the world for the first time?” Knopf says. “It’s been cool to dust off these primitive, sometimes half-finished contenders for the records.”
In their early days, the trio embraced a layered, loop-based approach unusual for any band, let alone one whose members describe themselves as “heavy rock fans at heart.” Knopf even created a custom software program, Deeler, to help the band shepherd disparate loops into coherent songs.
While their live show generally featured Knopf on Rhodes electric piano, Seim on drums and Harris on bass, the records were embellished with layer upon layer of saxophones, bells and acoustic piano. They still sounded like a rock band, albeit a fearsomely unorthodox one, and the combination of word of mouth and acclaim from online publications like Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes led to their third album, Friend and Foe, selling 50,000 copies—quite the feat for a band that sounded like nothing else even in the anything-goes climate of 2000s indie.
“I still have most of the words memorized from every early review we got, and a lot of it was saying how we sounded like a remix of our recorded version live,” Seim says. “I think we’ve always had fun playing around with how we sound live as opposed to how nerdy we can sound on recordings.”
Each member sang, played various instruments, and was a willful creative personality. I Am the Fun Blame Monster, whose title is an anagram of “the first Menomena album,” involved more in-person collaboration than later albums like Mines that were assembled largely through email.
It was around the time of Mines that Menomena began to take on a reputation for dysfunction, with the band’s distinctly different self-described personality types (“a nerd, a jock and a stoner”) beginning to clash even as they were making some of the best music of their lives. By the time of a tense Willamette Week profile (“Everyone Loves Menomena...Except Menomena,” Sept. 7, 2010), the band’s members were clearly at a breaking point and barely speaking to each other about matters non-musical.
Knopf walked away from the band in 2011, focusing on the solo project Ramona Falls and releasing an album with the National’s Matt Berninger as El Vy. He also contributed to the soundtracks of the shows Bob’s Burgers and Central Park, even playing as part of the live Bob’s Burgers backing band when the cast performed the show’s whimsical and frequently disgusting songs (sample title: “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom”).
Harris and Seim released Moms, a raucous but deeply personal meditation on family, as a two-piece in 2012. It’s the band’s last full-length to date. Harris subsequently joined the popular U.K. rock band Bloc Party, contributing to their two most recent albums during an eight-year stint. (“I mostly played bass,” he says, despite receiving songwriting credits on 2022′s Alpha Games.)
Seim has been shuttling between Salem and the Portland neighborhood of Louisville, Ky., where he works as co-director of the Portland Museum and is currently leading a project to create an immersive children’s museum. He also formed the band Pfarmers with another National member, drummer Bryan Devendorf, and continued his pre-Menomena project Lackthereof.
The band never officially broke up, and members still saw each other from time to time. Eventually, Seim suggested to Knopf that it’d be “sad if we never played those songs again.”
“I was a little confused,” Knopf says. “I was like, do you mean for fun? Then we realized it was the anniversary of our first record, so we decided to put together this little show where we’re gonna play that first record again.”
Though the band says it’s unlikely they’ll ever return to life on the road, they haven’t entirely ruled out the possibility of another performance. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Knopf mused on the idea of a show celebrating Friend and Foe if this month’s gigs go “super well,” but for now, they’re happy just to give I Am the Fun Blame Monster a new lease on life.
“We never got famous enough for other people to cover our songs,” Knopf jokes. “We have to do it ourselves.”
SEE IT: Menomena plays Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., 971-808-5094, revolutionhall.com. 8 pm Friday–Saturday, Aug. 10–11. $20 (Aug. 10 sold out). All ages.