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Portland's Music Millennium has many great free shows, but tomorrow night's might be the best of the year so far. It's going to be packed for sure, but I've heard that if you buy the Menomena album beforehand you have a guaranteed seat.

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From Press Release:
*RECORD RELEASE EVENT!*
*MENOMENA*
*FREE LIVE PERFORMANCE*
*Music Millennium – 3158 East Burnside 503-231-8926*
*Tuesday, July 27th 6:00 PM*

Menom­ena formed in late 2000, when Brent Knopf grad­u­ated from Dart­mouth Col­lege and returned to Port­land to col­lab­o­rate with Justin Har­ris and Danny Seim. They played their first show in July 2001, at The Meow Meow, a now-defunct all ages venue in Portland.

The band's name was cho­sen for "the way it rolls off the tongue, sex­u­ally, or some­thing" and has no spe­cific mean­ing, although it is often assumed to refer to the Piero Umil­iani song "Mah Nà Mah Nà", a sta­ple of The Mup­pet Show. A recent audio­clip from SpotDJ had Brent stat­ing that the band name was a con­trac­tion of the words "Men" and "Phe­nom­ena". This is most likely a joke.

The band uses a com­puter pro­gram called the Dig­i­tal Loop­ing Recorder, or Deeler for short, in the song writ­ing process — it was pro­grammed by band mem­ber Brent Knopf. Drum­mer Danny Seim explains the process, "First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of head­phones. We then take turns pass­ing a sin­gle mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instru­ment, while another one of us will lay down a short impro­vised riff over the click track. We usu­ally start with the drums. Once the drums begin loop­ing, we throw on some bass, piano, gui­tar, bells, sax, or what­ever other sort of noise­maker hap­pens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process demo­c­ra­tic, which is the only way we can operate".

They self-released their debut album, I Am the Fun Blame Mon­ster!, in 2003. The album was elab­o­rately pack­aged in an 80-page flip­book that Seim designed and indi­vid­u­ally hand-assembled. In 2005, Under an Hour was released as a three-track album of instru­men­tal music writ­ten for and per­formed with Mon­ster Squad, an exper­i­men­tal dance com­pany based in Portland. Menom­ena released their next album in 2007, titled Friend and Foe. It received rel­a­tive crit­i­cal acclaim — while some web­sites like Pitch­fork Media praised the album for its effec­tive mod­u­lar pop, oth­ers like Pop­Mat­ters crit­i­cized it for pre­sent­ing a sense of feigned matu­rity.

Menomena's newest work, Mines, comes after a period of significant upheaval that has left them with no shortage of new ideas, and this album is as good or better than anything they've done to-date. In the wake of brutal disagreements, unrelenting grudges and failed marriages (not to mention a world full of modern terrorism, natural disasters and economic collapse) Menomena is still standing, and has made an album that many are already saying defines the state of intelligent pop music one decade into the millennium.