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.

“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."