Review: The Men - Leave Home

Joining the ranks of bands with ungoogleable names - Rate Your Music reliably informs me there are at least five artists with the same name - the bleary front cover of Leave Home is similarly inscrutible. And whilst the band's searing noise rock, with its nods to Sonic Youth in particular, hints at the band's Brooklyn roots, there is, in truth, no single overriding influence  to The Men's sound. But if there's one binding factor which ties these 8 songs together, its that whatever The Men put their hand to - be it no wave, garage, space rock or doom metal - they push it deep into the red and beat the living crap out of it.

Leave Home, the band's second full-length, has a kickarse factor that few albums this year are likely to match. Vocals are largely undecipherable, except for when the band what them to be heard, such as the cheeky lyrical lift from Spacemen 3's Take Me To The Other Side on (). For the most part, however, they're simply there to add another layer to The Men's sonic assualt. 

The album's midrift is The Men at their most unyielding. Think is snarling hardcore, punctuated  by disintegrations into jazzy noise. LADOCH's gruelling, slow metal grind and monstrous vocals recall Harvey Milk. Repeated listens soften the blow, but those two songs feels like a deliberate false turn in anticipation for the album's outstanding second half. ()'s lyrical steal is aptly put to a searing Spacemen 3-esque guitars. Shitting With The Shaw takes the other side of that sound, its patient build of  slow wah-wah guitar providing the album's sole breather, before culminating in an explosive finale. Bataille, a potent garage rocker loosely similar to Sonic Youth's Hey Joni, is the album's most immediately gratifying cut, whilst the swarmy dub-punk closer Night Landing suggests at yet another direction this band could go in.

For all that, Leave Home holds together extremely well, its blend of genres not pulling against one another, but bound tightly together by The Men's sheer conviction. Hopefully they'll feel no need to rein in their influences on future records; if they imbue all of their albums with this amount of energy, they'll have no problems forging an identity of their own.

85/100