The Men's Wild Take on Rock Tropes Is Always Different and Always the Same

The Men can be just about anybody they want to. That’s been the truest joy in following the New York based band over their 10 years of existence. Under the banner of rock’s most appropriately malleable name they’ve made stoned desert jams, queasily atonal noise indebted to the New York tradition known only as pigfuck, dazed love songs, expansive studio rat rock music, and at least one record inspired by Bob Dylan’s least loved era. You never know exactly what you’re going to get, or even who you’re going to get necessarily—save for songwriters Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi—on a given record (though the lineup has stabilized with bassist Kevin Faulkner and drummer Rich Samis over the latter part of their decade in action).

“Anything goes here,” Chiericozzi says over email of the Men’s constant morphing. “I’ve done shows blindfolded, with sitar, harmonica, clarinet, saxophone, drums, bass, guitar, chanting, read poetry, sang, shaker, tambourine, hand claps, watched from the audience, whatever… and that’s just me.”

Sorta like that famous John Peel quote about how the Fall were “always different, and always the same,” the Men have found excitement in instability, never really emerging from the shadows the same way twice. There aren’t many bands who nominally make rock music who push themselves in the same way, at least ones who’ve been able to maintain their core sensibilities amidst the constant shifting.

For the Men, that core rests on the relationship between Perro and Chiericozzi, who started the project from the ashes of another band, Fucking Hell. “I was pretty much tagging along with Mark,” Chiericozzi remembers of their unassuming beginnings. “I pretty naturally knew we wanted to keep playing together despite that.”

2018 marks their tenth year as a band, but they’re a strange act to watch celebrate an anniversary, if only because they’ve done so many things over the course of their existence. Sometimes it feels like Chiericozzi and Perro have fronted ten different bands in as many years, but their new record Drift, due March 2 on their longtime label home of Sacred Bones, provides a convincing link between all of them, a sort of capstone on the ten years they’ve served together so far, as well as, of course, highlighting bold new directions.

Chiericozzi says the record was recorded a month after the birth of his son, the intervening period of which he spent mostly attending to his duties as a new dad. "We didn’t really practice much in the days before the first couple sessions,” he says. “I hadn’t really been out of the house in a month and I didn’t really like what I saw when I did venture out.”

Consequently, the first song they laid down was “Killed Someone,” a tense collection of frigid riffs premiering here, that provides the closest connections to the earliest version of the band. Guitars roil and wind around one another, in blunt slashes that’d make the Ashetons proud, and the vocals blister and unsettle as they sing of desperate murder.

Chiericozzi says that with the obvious exception of “Killed Someone,” he tried to stay away from leaning on electric guitar leads. “That really opened the record and gave it a real distant, cold feeling,” he says. “We went back and added ‘Rose on Top of the World’ and ‘So High,’ which warmed it up a bit. But before that, it felt like Pluto—icy as hell.”

Songs like “Sleep” and “Come to Me” evoke the hallucinatory ballads that filled New Moon, while “Rose on Top of the World” and “So High” present a mellow version of the gory, surreal psychedelia of they’ve come to favor in recent years. It can feel like a survey of the bands best moments, revisited with the perspective and care of having bounced ideas off one another for a full decade a more complete vision of their band than they’ve ever really presented before.

But then there’s also “Maybe I’m Crazy,” the record’s opener, which sounds like little else they’ve ever made, an industrial-leaning synth exercise that’s as close to the dancefloor as they’ve ever dared to tread. Its bound to the other songs by the iciness that Chiericozzi identifies, which to my ears, basically means all these disparate songs are befitting of blaring from the stage of Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, but it also presents a way forward for a band who’ve more or less exhausted every mode available to guitar-bound songwriters. What’s next? Ditch the guitars. Maybe. “In some ways this very moment feels like the beginning of this whole thing,” Chiericozzi says. “We’re not really afraid to do anything.”

The only thing to know is that whatever comes next, it’ll probably be different. But it’ll be the Men. That’s just how they do things.

The Men tour dates: March 2 - Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool
March 3 - Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool
April 21 - Montreal, QC @ La Vitrola
April 27 - Austin, TX @ Levitation Festival
April 28 - Norman, OK @ Norman Music Festival
May 28 - Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Festival
May 29 - Madrid, ES @ El Sol
May 30 - Lisbon, PT @ Music Box
May 31 - Porto, PT @ Maus Habitos
June 1 - London, UK @ Oslo

The Men's Drift is out March 2 on Sacred Bones.

Colin Joyce is an editor for Noisey and is on Twitter.