Live Review: The Men

Imagining The Men without Ben Greenberg is imagining life without chilli-flavoured Roadies. It's possible but it's really only going in one direction. Front and centre, the bassist – who engineered the band's 2012 album Open Your Heart before jumping aboard – is the driving force in every way. His relentless thrashing of his instrument, an OH&S nightmare that will surely soon lead to carpal tunnel (and he shakes his wrist out after every song tonight), is the live thrill and focal point of the Brooklyn four-piece. When banter is called for – twice, approximately, to mumble something or other – it's Greenberg doing the mumbling. The merch table is even selling records by his solo project Hubble and his former group Pygmy Shrews.

But playing is not songwriting, and it was the paisley-meets-punk moments on the band's last record that showed they were more than a bunch of white outer-borough slackers biding time between bong hits. More specifically, they were outer-borough slackers who could shape tooth-and-nail rock'n'roll rhythms into songs that might moisten the eye of a Cream-puffed Eric Clapton. Tonight we get that in the form of album opener Turn It Around and Animal, as well as a bunch of new rattling songs that will no doubt appear on the band's forthcoming fourth record.

It's the combination of Greenberg's live offering and the heartbreak-tinged melodies offered by guitarists (and co-vocalists, with Greenberg) Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi that makes The Men worthy of mention in the tradition of this music, that being: four greasy dudes pick up guitars and bash out shouty verses and choruses about girls. But tonight that's really only barely apparent. They're good, they're fun, but they're playing in a city currently not lacking in imaginative rock bands (who get little attention from the Laneway set), in a venue that isn't helping them transfer their angst to a stand-and-sip audience. Before the set is up there's already talk in the crowd of the band's free show at the Gasometer the following night. It isn't hard to describe what we're not getting and the scale on which we should be getting it. You can't eat Roadies in the shower.