With their fourth full-length disc, Portland trio Menomena have made their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – a gorgeous and moody collection of songs about weathering emotional storms that’s meticulously orchestrated and tuneful. Brent Knopf, Justin Harris and Danny Seim craft their songs by recording and arranging loops, but nothing about Mines feels antiseptic or chilly: “Taos” is a slamming blues-rock track jammed with jazzy piano and squealing electric guitar, “Bote” bristles with TV on the Radio’s frenetic rhythm and “Killemall” channels the Zombies’ ear-tickling blend of major and minor chords. At times, the dense layers of horns, keys and drums are at war with one another, creating a mini-cacophony on tracks like “Five Little Rooms.” But Mines makes room for moments of simple subtlety, like muted closer “Intil,” which sounds like a lost Postal Service tune fed through Menomena’s folky, proggy filter.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”