Tomorrow's Hits
Brooklyn’s The Men release their fifth album in five years, sounding ever more like the last band standing at the end of a long night. The “Highway 61 Revisited”–like blast of “Pearly Gates” is several steps off the hook, with slide guitar, harmonica, and pounding piano creating a chaos that’s always been the true sound and spirit of rock ’n’ roll. In 2014, not many bands rock with this abandon without mirroring their heroes too closely. The Men have earned comparisons to The E Street Band and The Replacements along the way, though, thankfully, they aim away from the tortured-soul antics. “Settle Me Down” nails a midtempo rock ’n’ roll feel. Despite tracks being recorded in a “high-end studio” and being “their highest fidelity album to date,” according to their press materials, there’s still anarchic fun, considering the songs were recorded in two days and tracked live. No matter how they clean it up, it dirties up all over again. With tunes like “Going Down” and “Another Night” (complete with horn section), The Men might not have hits, but they have classics.
After spending much of 2011 and 2012 on the road, The Men decided to take the winter of 2012 off to work on new material in Brooklyn. The converted founding member Mark Perro’s bedroom in Bushwick into a practice space and rehearsed there nearly every day for three months, cutting more than 40 demos. By the end of that winter, The Men had pared that crop of songs down to 13. With their plans to take a break foiled by their own work ethic, they decided to record those songs before New Moon came out. They booked two days at Brooklyn’s Strange Weather studios, clocked in, and tracked all 13 songs entirely live, even including a horn section. Eight songs from those sessions made the final cut for The Men’s new LP, Tomorrow’s Hits. This is their first album recorded in a high-end studio and, appropriately, the result is their most high fidelity album to date. That being said, it is still an incredibly straightforward record. Tomorrow’s Hits is a concise collection of songs that nonetheless expands the band’s ever-evolving musical palette. It’s full of genre-bending risks, but it reinforces the overarching theme that has come to define its makers: The Men are a great rock band.
Tomorrow's Hits is the first record the Men put together in a high-end studio, but a year after New Moon, the message is the same: they’re a rock band and the roll continues.
Watching a band mellow and mature over the years can be a wonderful thing. And then there’s The Men. Tomorrow’s Hits is the Brooklyn outfit’s fifth album in five years, but it sounds as if it’s been decades since 2010’s Immaculada. Rather than morphing gradually from avant-punk agitators to roots-rock-meets-’80s-indie…
Back with another reinvention, the incredibly prolific yet consistent Brookln band bring plenty of rock and roll muscle to an honest and superb new record.
Brooklyn’s The Men have made a fairly dramatic transformation from their inception as a contemplative noise-rock amalgam…
Their fifth album in as many years, the Men prove themselves to be not only prolific, but wildly versatile on Tomorrow's Hits.
Why the Men to abandoned noisy, hardcore punk and turned themselves into Crazy Horse remains one of the great musical mysteries, but on their fifth LP in as many years, the Brooklyn band completes the transition.
For all their mutations, The Men generally don't do anything they'd be ashamed to have splayed across the front page of the Village Voice. They make rock music, flexibly and without posturing.
Album review: The Men - Tomorrow's Hits. "Album five finds the Brooklyn band genre-hopping again, making for a focused, solid offering."
The latest album by Brooklyn punks turned classic rockers possesses a ramshackle charm, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong>
Review Of Tomorrow's Hits By 'The Men', the album comes out via Sacred bones on March 3rd. The Men play March 2nd in Allston, Ma at Great Scott's.