(Sacred Bones)
RECOMMENDED
Open Your Heart, the second record by poorly named Brooklyn punks the Men (surely more than one of us remembers the shitty modern rock band of the same name with a radio staple or two from what doesn't seem like a long time ago?), is one of the more exciting and enjoyable rock albums making the rounds at the moment. What's intriguing about it, though, is how expansive it is without reaching far beyond a simple guitar-band setup with slightly outsized college-rock ambitions. Most telling is that with a couple of exceptions, the tunes are far more engaging and pronounced when heard together -- emphasized by the seguing between songs, an increasing rarity in the iTunes age -- than when shuffled around with other material. "Ex-Dreams" skirted right past me when it was sent to me as a promo early this year; as the closing track of this dizzying album, though, the grunging goes somewhere because it's not one of the directions already laid out. Its instructive Sonic Youth melody is more impressive when you consider the ground covered on the rest of the LP.
"Punk" really isn't the half of it -- yet it's all of it. With bedroom laptoppery constantly mining pop's past, now it's the guitar band's turn to appropriate the well-worn and well-loved excesses of Wire (thrashy "Cube"), early My Bloody Valentine ("Please Don't Go Away"), Joy Division ("Oscillation"), Burma and the Buzzcocks ("Open Your Heart"), and the Replacements ("Candy"). Yet everything here identifiably belongs together, pieces of the same band's tangent. The result is a record of pleasing throwback eclecticism that sometimes reaches wonderful heights, all with a certain cozy consistency.
It also sometimes crosses over into what sounds like an unwillingness to focus -- the crass, metallic aggression of "Turn It Around" is just faintly turned around to reveal the glam "Animal," and there's nothing indulgent or excessive but the veering off into other directions gives the faster, more "expected" material a hint of boredom and restlessness, especially when such tracks are mostly clumped together at the beginning and end. Because the instant "Country Song" starts, with its stunning distortion binge contemplatively hunkering down to give you something you'd like to fucking live in, it's whiplash -- culminating in the catharsis of the seven-minute "Oscillation," intense and drowning and eventually gathering itself into an impenetrable roar. Then suddenly, it's off to the anguished drama and oooooohs of "Please Don't Go Away." It's a funhouse restlessness, and it gives the Men an air of mystery that's both ingratiating and frustrating.
No one would really care, for instance, if just any Brooklyn punk band (lord knows there are enough of 'em!) put "Cube" and "Ex-Dreams" and "Animal" all on an album together of songs that were written and recorded in that brash aesthetic. But it feels like a point is being belabored when roughly half the songs on Open Your Heart read in that context and each of the five others is off in its own separate facility and sensibility. That strange imbalance is the only thing that makes this hard to love, and perhaps it's deliberate.
At its best, this is a thrilling album. It shares its title with a song on which the eponymous sentiment seems fully appropriate, a lilting and triumphant love-song melody triumphantly sung and played as a prodding anthem, strongly suggestive of Hüsker Dü (the apocalyptic bridge in particular) -- except these Men are still shouting, begging for acceptance. If they didn't find it already, surely you'll be seduced by "Candy," the best of their gleeful experiments by a considerable margin. The voice is Paul Westerberg, easy, but the writing is all sulking hard-drinking Stones, a Let It Bleed-like, gorgeous countrified anthem so assured and mature and uncompromisingly abrasive it makes you stop in your tracks, and fully recontextualizes all that's around it. Effortless, too, as if made by people who didn't care how it sounded -- it just seems to snap into place.
Of course, being a band that exists, the Men have also heard of the Velvet Underground, and given that the glorious can't-say-enough-about-it "Candy" is such an outlier, the true measure of the Men's (any band's) success is how good their VU moment is. The psyched out "Presence" owes a debt to the 13th Floor Elevators and Galaxie 500 as well, all disaffected drone like a guy pretending not to feel worshipful of the sounds his guitar can generate; the measure of its excellence is how you keep expecting it to break into "Here She Comes Now."
It's hard to say yet if the Men will find a way to either harness the sprawl in a more controlled and ultimately satisfying manner or if they'll simply keep tinkering with song-to-song makeovers like these, but the world can easily be theirs if they want it. Open Your Heart is an arresting document of a gifted, powerful young band at that perfect moment of feeling invincible and infinite -- and willing, naturally, to try just about anything.
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