This weeks selection for Find of The Week falls somewhere in the limbo realm of new finds as Ramona Falls is headed up by Brent Knopf who is also a prominent member of the indie band Menomena, who is signed to Warner, making them not exactly a band that needs to be found. While I am very aware of Menomena I was unaware of Knopf’s solo work until today, making it a new find, technically.
The stand out track for me would have to be “Russia” which has some beautiful sporadic surges that kept me ever attentive to my speaker volume, being at work and all. Knopf has a knack of taking musical snippets and forming them into perfectly flowing tracks. Of the four songs that I’ve heard, a musician could easily have taken the significantly different parts from each and formed a dozen new songs that would still have been decent tracks but are made better by the fact that Knopf can combine these parts seamlessly.
The debut album, Intuit, is out August 18th on Barsuk Records.
Ramona Falls – “Russia”
Ramona Falls – “I Say Fever”
Ramona Falls – “Melectric”
In the comments below Andrew has set me straight about what label Menomena is signed to. I should have realized that their MySpace page was a joke when they listed their labels as “Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI Warner Bros.”
I appropriate you for covering this release. We’re sure to hear a lot more about it in the next few weeks/months. I have one very important correction however and that is that Menomena is NOT signed to Warner nor have they ever been. Menomena self released their first album and even produced each unit by hand until the response was too great. Originally they worked with John Askew’s FILMguerrero who continues to handle vinyl releases. Their deal with Barsuk was on the table for over a year before they accepted. A major issue was the flip book packaging for “…Fun Blame Monster” which the label initially believed was infeasible. That and the fact that they wanted more tracks added to the album before it’s re release which the band was unwilling to agree to. Germany’s City Slang is licensed for European distribution. Seattle’s Barsuk is not owned even partly by a major but neighboring Sub Pop is. I believe that a bands business dealings are highly personal and I would never judge anyone for their decisions but I have a lot of respect for Menomena and their desire to preserve their artistic aesthetics. I can assure you that any association by the band to a major is purely sarcastic.