New Music: The Men - Ex Dreams

Last year's Leave Home from Brooklyn pysch/noise-rockers The Men was one of the year's most exhilirating releases; it charted at #11 on KILAS' top 20 albums of the year, but it passed under a lot of people's radars. On the strength of Ex-Dreams, however, Open Your Heart, The Men's forthcoming album, will suffer no such problems; it has the sound of a band about to make the big time.

Listen to it here. Open Your Heart comes out 5th March on Sacred Bones.

Albums of 2011: 15-11

15. Okkervil River - I Am Very Far
Having got bogged down with some concept-heavy albums of late, Okkervil River rediscovered their muse with I Am Very Far. Self-produced by Will Sheff, the use of double-tracking gave the band a punchier sound, and with no overriding theme, the focus seemed to be on producing a diverse and creative set of songs, from the climactic White Shadow Waltz to the haunting Show Yourself, bringing the band close to the heights previously reached on 2005's Black Sheep Boy.


14. Radiohead - The King Of Limbs

Radiohead's 8th LP arrived with all of the drama we've come to expect, and opinion was predictably divided. Was it too short? Was there a follow-up (the album's parting words of  "If you think this is over, then you're wrong" was very knowing)? Did it break any new ground for the band, or the world of popular music in general? Whilst a Kid A-style reapprasial may not be on the cards, time will tell just where it stands in the Radiohead canon, but for now its intricately textured songs, drawing as much from Bon Iver as they did James Blake, sounded just right in 2011.

13. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
Formerly of alt-folk act Gowns, Erika M Anderson's debut solo LP was the year's most cathartic and beautifully damaged record. By turns stark and vulnerable (Marked), brash and resolute (California) and unhinged (Milkman), lyrics such as "I wish that everytime he touched me left a mark" could be translated in multiple ways. A suitably harrowing record on the woes of drug addiction, it made total sense when Anderson wound up covering Endless, Nameless on a tribute to Nevermind.

12. Metronomy - The English Riviera
Joseph Mount's third LP with Devon-based Metronomy saw the band continue to evolve from their giddy electronic beginnings to purveyors of super-smart pop, falling somewhere between XTC and the Pet Shop Boys. Deliciously bittersweet songs such as Everything Goes My Way and The Look sunk their hooks in deep, whilst the ravier likes of Corinne and album highlight The Bay showed that Mount hadn't completely lost touch with his roots.

 

11. The Men - Leave Home
Brooklyn-based the Men channeled every form of noise-based rock from the past 30 years into a single exhilirating release. Whether it was Sonic Youth-inspired no wave, Harvey Milk-esque doom metal, or Spacemen 3-style space rock (they even had the bare-faced cheek to crib lyrics from Take Me To The Other Side), everything was pushed up into the red and played with unwavering tenacity. They could go in any number of directions from here.

#20-16

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