Sunday, June 05, 2011

the Men - Leave Home

I'll keep this short and sweet. Do you like punk rock? Do you like garage rock? Do you like desperate, emotional music cloaked in layers of distortions and noise? If so you should definitely check it out.  The Men are a noise punk band from Brooklyn. The basics of the music tends towards older school punk and garage rock. Lots of odd noises that come out of nowhere and solo's that start as squeels and end in shredding.

The best songs on here are fairly standard punk rock tunes that take off noisily, are blasted through and are over before you know it. And yet they manage to pack some twists and turns, a sonic surprise or two in nearly ever track. And they don't necessarily need to be all that fast and aggressive to make the songs work. Shittin With The Shaw slows things down significantly but stays noisy while verging in on emotional, instrumental post rock before evolving into another turned up to 11 jam.

I may be doing this a disservice by accenting the noisy, lo fi nature of this because that doesn't matter all that much. As long as you have good songs you generally have good punk. And even if you don't have good songs if you play fast enough and loud enough you can skate by. Thankfully the songs are rock solid and the noise tweaks only make them standout more