Album Review: Leave Home by The Men

Nothing is sacred to the Men. For one, this Brooklyn quartet's name is pretty much identical to that of fellow New Yorker JD Samson's active post-Le Tigre project, MEN. Their 2010 sophomore release, Immaculada, featured a caterwauling noise-punk thrasher called "Oh Yoko" that had absolutely nothing to do with the classic John Lennon song, or Ms. Ono herself, for that matter.

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The Men‘s debut LP, Leave Home, is an eight-course feast curated and prepared by Black Flag, Guy Picciotto, Sleep, and Queens of the Stone Age, but it leaves a singular aftertaste that is all its own. From the bowels of Brooklyn basement-jammers and loft shows, The Men arrive with their first LP on Sacred Bones, attacking the current scene with a full cache of influences. Fractured, gaunt sounds are bolstered with the barks of hardcore, the drones of gaze, and the ceaselessness of psych.

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The Men's brand of wildly careening, sonically imposing post-hardcore is challenging but rewarding on their debut record Leave Home. The three vocalists and songwriters in the band draw influence from a wide world of noise. From sludgy metal to post-apocalyptic soundscapes, droning Krautrock to screaming hardcore and shimmering shoegaze-y textures, the band weaves the strands together into an album that delivers plenty of sonic destruction, but also moments of almost fragile beauty.

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As scuzzy and tinnitus-inducing as Brooklyn group The Men's second LP is, their wellspring of creative inspiration doesn't come from shallow rock and roll posturing or self-aggrandizing theatrics. Instead the source of all their noise and fury is an encyclopaedic geek knowledge of the noisier punk rock elements of the last 30 years of musical history. There might be familiar elements here, but the Men make thrillingly punishing punk so well that this ceases to matter.

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Brooklyn four-piece stand at the edge of a breakthrough – now, do they stick or twist? Alex Deller 2011 Let’s just get this out in the open from the get-go: The Men are weird, and The Men are not going to play music that will always necessarily please you. The Brooklyn band’s latest album Leave Home, y’see, is a wonderful grab-bag of anomalous sounds that pilfers magpie-like from genre after genre as it charts its 41-minute course. Their most feted moment, Bataille, for instance, possesses a glacial sense of cool and cuts through the fug to be found elsewhere like cold autumn sunshine through a hangover, representing a back-handed slap to the face of every cut-rate indie twonk who’s ever had the gall to compare their band to The Stooges or The Velvet Underground.

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