Menomena brings abstract art-rock to life at the Bottleneck

The dense, aggressively stylized music of Portland, Oregon’s Menomena hits me in a weird way. I love the inventiveness, the audacity, and the ceaseless creativity; yet I sometimes find Menomena’s bric-a-brac process nauseating. It can be hard to gain orientation in its manic, shoehorning of styles. Their music is part hard-rock, part jazz, part funk — actually, it’s part everything — and it requires a very specific mood.

Live, however, Menomena transforms into a group of full-fledged rock stars, and its knotty and disjointed sonic palette becomes more breathable.