Let’s enter the conversation in the proper context: The Men,
hailing from Brooklyn, came to prominence with their 2011 album Leave Home, a sweltering, abrasive,
uneasy album with dark noise and vocals that resembled a man hacking up a lung;
it was an album that kept your heart beating faster than you could ever have
anticipated. 2012 brought Open Your Heart,
which took their harsh tones and intense energy, and compressed their
7-minute-long jams into 3-minute blistery punk love songs. By 2013’s release, New Moon, The Men had become a
fully-fledged country punk band, introducing acoustic guitar, piano, and
electric lap steel guitar into their songs. They still carried with them their
knack for raucous energy, but transformed it into a studio country-alt-rock
record.
In 2014, enter the saxophone.
It’s been made extremely clear through this year’s release, Tomorrow’s Hits, we are no longer
referring to the abrasive noise-punk band when we mention THE MEN. True, they
still rock. But The Men have become an entirely new entity in their music. The
process had seemed fairly unclear in the beginning. I had the idea that the
Brooklyn outfit were radically changing from album to album, and that 2014 or
2015 would bring them either full circle to another noise album, or they would
be even further out into uncharted territory. But Tomorrow’s Hits treads steadily along the footsteps of its older
brother, New Moon. There is still a
country twang and a gilded sunset-tinge of Americana in The Men’s writing. What
the band has chosen to delve further into is its experience in studio
recording. These rock songs have silvery shining guitar leads, swells from lap
steel and pinky slides, hums from electric organ, harmonica interludes, and
horn lines that meet at the intersection of American doo wop and honky-tonk.
The album’s highlights are deeply enriched in vintage
U-S-of-A rock & roll nostalgia. “Dark Waltz,” the opening cut, pops out of
nowhere in a straight-ahead early Tom Petty rock song of cool gain from the
guitars and lyrical coo of old wrong-side-of-the-tracks songwriting. “Another
Night” bursts with late sixties styled rock horns that mesh somewhere between
older Nick Drake and early Blood, Sweat & Tears. The album’s first single,
“Pearly Gates,” is probably their most accessible for fans of The Men’s earlier
albums. It is their fastest track, with pushing rhythmic guitars and slurring
vocals that remind me heavily of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed (and an excellent
stuttering lyric that lends my ear to Roger Daltry).
I’ll admit, I’d been hoping for The Men to return to their
earlier songs. I had seen them play at the Mohawk Place in late 2012, six
months after the release of Open Your
Heart. I had fully expected to come home with a bloody nose from that show,
but even by November, they had already become a different band. It’s taken me
some time to settle in on the new sound of the band, but what has really struck
me is that no matter the genre – these guys have guts, they have soul, they
have heart, and they’ve got the brains to get in the studio and make any genre
sound good. Tomorrow’s Hits is an
album for a road trip through the Midwest. It is windows-down,
arm-out-the-window rock. It is fun music blaring from the back stage at your
favorite dive bar. I think the boys in The Men have proven that they are going
to have fun with their music and truly play for themselves – and I expect
several more albums of theirs to come forth in the following years.
Grade: A-
