Review of The Men: New Moon

The Men: New Moon (Sacred Bones, 2013)

I came fairly late to the party, I’ll admit.  The Men were a buzzed about band going back to 2009’s We Are The Men EP, but I first checked them out after hearing a few tracks from 2012’s Open Your Heart.  Much of what attracted the band some early attention, most notably the rough edges and the ‘pigfuck’ sound of the early records, had begun to be sanded down on that record.  The earlier albums, 2010’s Immaculada and 2011’s Leave Home were obviously indebted to 80’s alternative stalwarts like Big Black, Butthole Surfers, and Jesus Lizard, but also paid obvious homage to the more heartfelt and melodic bands of that era (The Replacements, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr).  Open Your Heart divided some opinions by including a twangy country-leaning track “Candy” and toning down the aggression for atmosphere (less punk-skronk and more shoegaze and psychedelica) but still seemed to placate the folks who saw The Men as a rebirth of 80’s noise rock.  If the bands in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life served, in some fashion, as the template for the early version of The Men, many of those same bands (and the bands that those bands splintered into) changed their sound, softened, and altered their tone in their later phases.  So it seems to be with The Men, as well.  Producer/engineer Ben Greenberg has become a full-fledged member, and founding bass player Chris Hansell (acknowledged as the proponent of much of the louder, noisier elements in the earlier albums) was relieved of his role in the band because of his financial inability to go on tour, and these changes have certainly manifested in the sound of the record.  It is considerably more melodic, more poppy, and more accessible, on the whole, as the previous records.   

Fans of pigfuck will likely stop listening about 30 seconds in, when the gentle folk strut of “Open The Door”, with its high ‘ooh-ooh’ backing vocals and mandolin solos, reveals the new Men to be a pretty, poppy endeavor.  Being There-era Wilco is a certainly a fair comparison for much of this record, and the increased attention to melody and improved vocal chops (there are no phlegm-laden coughs present here!) only serves to help make these songs stick in the listener’s heads.  The band has also acknowledged (notably in a Village Voice article) an appreciation for Tom Petty, and there are certainly some Petty-esque moments (the opening drum stomp of “Without A Face” is a dead ringer for “Runnin’ Down a Dream”) but there are also echoes of The Pixies (the opening chords of “I Saw Here Face” could be the opening chords of “Monkey Gone to Heaven”) as well as sprawling, epic guitar hero Neil Young and Crazy Horse or Dinosaur Jr (the end of “I Saw Her Face”) and ramshackle latter day solo Paul Westerberg (“The Seeds”), and even mid-period Teenage Fanclub (“I Saw Here Face”, yet again!) A loping, vaguely country-rock instrumental (“High and Lonesome”) highlights delicate lap steel and piano immediately before a pair of fuzzed-up thrashing punky tunes (“Electric” feels like the Stooges-meets-early Replacements).  Anyone who lamented The Men ‘going soft’ on the last record will likely lose their shit when they hear the electric piano and harmonica-centric “Bird Song”, but they might be eventually pulled back into New Moon’s orbit on the eight minute psych-rock burn of the closing track “Supermoon” where guitar solos seem to keep coming at you like a pack of rabid feral dogs, and where Dinosaur Jr and Spacemen 3 battle in a last-man standing match in an echo chamber.  I imagine this record will be divisive, but this for me, it’s akin to last year’s fantastic Japandroids record Celebration Rock: it’s a love letter to a golden age of alternative rock, full of moments lovingly cribbed from the bands that were your life to, somehow, create a new band that you can obsess about.  My 17 year old self has already scrawled the Sacred Bones logo on his Trapper Keeper