The Men – Leave Home
Sacred Bones
The cover art to The Men’s latest offering is a bit of a giveaway. All that’s discernible is a dark, vaguely threatening blur of four figures downtown at night — a useful pointer as to the Brooklyn quartet’s stark, blearily distorted sound. However, in no way does it fully prepare you for the at times harrowing, howling onslaught that is Leave Home, their third album and debut for Zola Jesus/Crystal Stilts launch pad Sacred Bones.
A record-hoarding junkie might slap them with a post-punk tag, but The Men pilfer from a ragtag bunch of bands (namely Sonic Youth, Black Sabbath, The Jesus Lizard, Dinosaur Jr), making them pleasingly tricky to pin. At times they could be The Stooges sledging through My Bloody Valentine’s wall of noise, as on opener ‘If You Leave…’; elsewhere it seems likely they’ve spent time spitting bile with misanthropic metallers Eyehategod, as on the agonising doom of ‘L.A.D.O.C.H.’ One thing’s for certain, however: whatever ugly splurge of noise they throw up, you know they mean it one hundred per cent, like they’ve poured every last blood vessel and frazzled nerve ending into producing the album.
In step with the DIY ethics of the US post-punk upheaval of the 1980s (think Fugazi and Black Flag), The Men are unswervingly uncompromising. They favour the squalling distortion of blown speakers, the channelling of pain through cheap, battered instruments. Out of nowhere, scrappy guitar lines bleed out, and the primitive vocals are often unbearable. Elsewhere, melody is virtually eschewed, except on ‘If You Leave…’, which surfs a huge wave of lysergic psychedelia. Indeed, the song in question, smashing through the seven-minute barrier, takes three minutes for its shoe-gaze-y buzz to fully kick in — a bloody-minded and righteous inversion of punk’s conventionally choppy, laconic structures.
You can’t help but feel admiration for the Men’s unapologetic stance on music, even if you do feel you’ve been tortured by the end of Leaving Home. Jamie Skey
