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The Men, "Open Your Heart"
Great rock 'n' roll bands can be deceptively hard to find. There's too often an empty gap between the dime-a-dozen bands playing to alt-rock radio, punk/hardcore traditionalism, and the toothless, blog-hyped indie scene. Thankfully, The Men exist outside all of those spheres as one of the finest rock bands around.
When I think about the music I anticipate, enjoy, and latch onto in terms of categorization, good ol' fashioned rock 'n' roll often gets a raw deal. In 2012 alone, the past few months, I've spent a good deal of time spinning Eyvind Kang's modern classical suite, The Narrow Garden; Oren Ambarchi's abstract monument, Audience of One; Lindstrøm's flawed but enjoyable (and danceable) Six Cups of Rebel; and Windy and Carl's immersive We Will Always Be. Bands I enjoy that perform with "rock" instruments are usually after something more sophisticated than adrenaline, raw energy, and righteous emotion, like Earth's cello-augmented drone, Alcest's shoegaze-meets-black-metal wall of bliss, or Bardo Pond's long-form psych improvisations. It's a rarity when I come across a traditional rock band that is more than the sum of its influences, able to hold my attention for longer than a catchy single or two. Right now, The Men are that band.
Last year's Leave Home is essentially, for myself and many listeners, The Men's first full-length album (2010's vinyl-only Immaculada was slept on). It ended up perhaps the year's best rock album—a noisy ball of energy, as much guitar scrape and scrawl as actual songcraft that succeeded primarily on account of capturing their rapturous live approach on record. Open Your Heart is their second album for Brookyln's finely curated Sacred Bones label. It is far more accessible than their past work, though not on a broadly commercial level (like, say, Madonna's 1986 number-one single of the same name). As a step forward, with greater emphasis on songwriting, melody, and sheer genre-hopping variety, it succeeds admirably.
Open Your Heart stands as an enjoyable record for a few reasons. First, its songwriting—with duties spread between all four members—has tightened up considerably. The title track is a fine example; to my ears, it's their catchiest and finest four minutes to date. The band's free-form noise and hardcore influences have been dialed back a fair amount, and the sequencing augments their transition into genre-hopping experiments. "Turn It Around" and "Animal" kick off the album with two barnstorming punk blasts before The Men dip their guitars into everything from instrumental, acid-fried country ("Country Song"—who'd have guessed it?) to Krautrock-influenced grooves ("Oscillation") to acoustic rock with steel-guitar accents ("Candy," which is just begging for radio play in between Neil Young and the Rolling Stones' "Angie").
If anything, Open Your Heart reminds me of Hüsker Dü's late '80s mindset, in which the band hopped between any and every genre in their record collection with disregard for punk traditionalism. The same no-rulebook approach guides The Men today, as they sequence the above-cited "Candy" into "Cube," a two-minute blast through fast-tempo drumming and shouting, then "Presence," which switches into Spacemen 3 tribute mode as the album's lengthiest song. By the time "Ex-Dreams" punctuates the record with three chords and an SST-worthy vocal melody, I'm spent, ready to take a break—just long enough to catch my breath before the next spin.
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