Continuing their reign as one of the hardest-working bands around, The Men release their fourth album, New Moon, some 11 months after their previous and end-of-year-highlight-worthy Open Your Heart – but is hard work enough?
The opening Open The Door could certainly leave some people scratching their heads – to call its honky-tonk-lo-fi piano grooves inauspicious is a great understatement. We find The Men in more familiar territory with Half Angel Half Light and I Saw Her Face; both are loud, fun, fuzzy and overdriven rockers done with that genuine love for the rock'n'roll the band imbue all their best tracks with. However, it's not until the record's second half that The Men really show what they're made of.
Album highlight, The Brass, nails the group's lo-fi, hard-edged rock sound perhaps better than any song they've recorded. It chugs along with protopunk-style piano chords that are increasingly muddled by crunchy guitars and wah-pedal screams – the closest the band have come to replicating their sublime live sound on record. The record is stacked through the second half with the final six songs being the clear album highlights, including the epic eight-minute, experimental and noisy album closer, Supermoon.
Overall, New Moon never leans as far into the experimental, stripped-back or noise-rock spheres as previous efforts might have done. It's more cohesive for this lack of exploration, but this does leave one longing for greater venturing from the comfort zone. This is a very good, intermittently great album that just barely fails to escape the ideas that define its sounds.
