Douglas Martin once quit a band called the Mansiere.
It’s excruciatingly difficult to take an angle on a band like The Men. They’re a quartet of punk dudes rapidly approaching thirty who make exactly the kind of music you’d expect from a quartet of punk dudes rapidly approaching thirty. They come from a bygone era of indie music, the glory days of labels like Homestead, SST, and Touch and Go– when it was known as college rock and off-center enough to virtually guarantee obscurity, a far cry from the digestible and marketable commodity it is today. If it sounds to you like I’m pining for those days, it’s because I am.
Every indie rock fan has their own vision of what the landscape of indie should look like and none of us are wrong. But there’s a double-edged sword involved. The same diversity that helped indie flourish in the lower regions of the mainstream has also contributed to the meaninglessness of the term “indie rock.” But while names like Sufjan Stevens and Leslie Feist have made the genre safe for people who read McSweeney’s and care about fair trade coffee, there are bands carrying the torch for indie’s abrasive, irreverent, and slightly weirder past. The Men are one of those bands.
Last year’s Leave Home was the visceral, pummeling breakthrough for a band that has previously spent most of their career destroying Brooklyn loft venues and issuing super-limited-edition cassettes of heavy punk music. It was everything The Men had done well since their inception in 2008, only with a greater focus and better production. In other words: The kind of stuff rock critics get all frothy over. In my Sacred Bones roundup late last year, I said, “More often than not, Leave Home literally sounds like a human being getting incinerated.” That’s among the highest praise I can offer any band.
Open Your Heart was conceived as a reaction to the violence of Leave Home, and it really shows a lot of the time. That’s not to say that The Men have toned down their brawnier aspects. Late-album standouts “Cube” and “Ex-Dreams” sound like they could have fit in the Leave Home sessions — and only on “Candy,” the album’s lone lackluster track, is there a genuinely softer presence felt. The Men still manage to retain their heaviness, but the songs are a little more freewheeling, a little more melodic. They’re (mostly) sung instead of screamed, the guitars (mostly) chug instead of screech.
In the development process of The Men’s songwriting, they’ve mastered the art of the buildup. “Country Song” and “Presence” start with solitary guitar figures and end with an easygoing psychedelic jam, and a measured explosion. The title track starts pedal to the floor and never relents, the climactic burst of late-80’s punk pumping from dilapidated vans on cross-continental drives, hopping from shitty punk basement to shitty punk basement. Even during its most standard tracks, the band has a palpable sense of energy that hardly lets up; a reminder that indie music started out as a weird, classic rock-influenced outgrowth of punk.
Jeff mentioned a few weeks ago that his greatest problem with indie music is that it mines a nostalgia for events that have barely even passed, that the genre doesn’t step outside of its narrow boundaries often enough. It’s an incredibly true statement, one that speaks to the hyper-accelerated, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it zeitgeists of modern indie. Everybody’s scrambling to preserve the past in fear of forgetting where we came from. Weirdly enough, The Men have been latched onto a zeitgeist of their own, as part of a “revival” of punk-influenced indie, bands that sound like they could have been Xeroxed right into the zines of college rock’s halcyon days. As the cliché goes, those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. With a band like The Men, that fate’s not bad at all.
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