It may come as a surprise that the M's released their sophomore record in February. Like most winter weekends, though especially this last weekend, the weather in the band's Chicago hometown is cold and unforgiving. It's the time of year when you smile a little less, skip the gym once too often, and stay home cuddling up with your televison more than what's healthy. The M's eponymous debut EP and following full-length were earnest, melodic reclamations of vintage David Bowie and T. Rex, eminently hummable and easy-to-swallow. Both were just a bit timid, however, as if the band was stepping in the footprints of their heroes in the snow, keeping their feet dry. Future Women, on the other hand, is a truck with chains on the tires and a plow on the bumper. It's a dense, ambitious record that finally has the confidence needed to pull of the swagger they've been approximating.
Opener "Plan of the Man" gives you a feeling for what's in front of you-- layered guitars, rich harmonies, a dash of horns at the end-- but it barely hints at the quality of the rest of the album. "Trucker Speed" is the hook to bring you in, where the band uses every trick in their arsenal. Strings bring suspense to the song's finale, while far-off horns punctuate guitars that lap the sides of the groove like big waves on a small boat. Really, it's really drummer Steve Warsaw working overtime here: Witness a cowbell that sounds like it's actually dangling from a cow's neck, and then the pounding that precedes the song's second half. It starts as a tractor chase, but it soon becomes a high-speed pursuit under the city's elevated train.
Elsewhere, "Shawnee Dupree" waves its threatening low-end behind its back while the boys make polite come-ons in three-part harmony, and "Going Over It" adds church bells to the corners of its molasses guitar crunch, somehow making it all the more ominous. A well-placed ballad ("Light I Love") clears the pallette for the hyper-melodic "My Gun", where the high notes of a xylophone skitter across the ever-present grinding of the guitars. More familiar pleasures follow, like the swaying title track, the horn-laden rave-up "Mansion of the Valley", and the starry-eyed closer "Darling Lucia".
It's well-tread ground the M's are bounding across; you'll hear far-too-familiar barrel-roll piano on "Never Do This Again", and you can see in your head the pained faces the guitarist is making for some of these licks, on the second return of "My Gun" and elswehere. But the issue isn't dodging cliché, it's how well you can swing it. The M's have found a canny chemistry out of seemingly simple parts (three-part harmonies plus a powerhouse drummer), and now, they've got swagger to spare.
