It's the first law of indie-rock: Every grungy, guitar-powered act-- from Dinosaur Jr. to Titus Andronicus-- eventually goes a little Crazy Horse, gradually easing their squalling sludgefeasts into a classic-rock comfort zone. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon for the Men. Over the course of two quick-succession albums, 2011's Leave Home and last year's Open Your Heart, the Brooklyn bruisers' primordial post-hardcore roar had exploded into a constellation of possibilities, exploring everything from krautrock to country to shoegazed psychedelia. But the Men that hit the road in early 2012 to promote Open Your Heart were already a different band than the one documented on that record. Their once-unwieldy noise was being harnessed into a more economical drive and harmonicas were being blown. A band that less than two years ago sounded like descendents of Big Black had already found their way to Big Pink.
This is the Men that greet us on New Moon-- recorded, natch, in a cabin in the Catskills. And what gracious hosts they've become, welcoming us in with the gentle, piano-tapped lullaby "Open the Door". Even when you take the band's rapid-fire maturation into account, the song still startles with its angelic harmonies, peaceful images of "trees swaying," and general air of bonhomie. But if the opener seemingly announces a break from the band's formative inspirations, New Moon as a whole reinforces their spiritual connection to them. In hindsight, 1980s indie rock wasn't so much an antidote to the preceding generation's dinosaur rock as a tough-love corrective measure to revitalize it, from the Minutmen’s CCR/BOC boosterism to Hüsker Dü's sand-blasted take on the Byrds. What the Men ultimately share with their SST forbears isn't a sound but a work ethic, with a record-release output that can barely keep pace with their artistic progression, fuelled by a blatant disregard for the punks they're bound to piss off along the way.
But as New Moon proves, there's a big difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy. The album's more rustic first side may exhibit their newly professed fondness for Tom Petty, but the spirit is still a lot closer to Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers. Acoustic guitars are front and center, but they slash and scrape rather than soothe; the early double shot of "Half Angel Half Light" and "Without a Face" suggests Full Moon Fever had Jeff Lynne been ousted from the producer's chair and replaced by Spot. What initially impresses about the record is not just that the Men have reconciled their growing affinity for delicate, confessional songcraft with their usual raw frayed-nerve energy, but how easy they make it look.
That's not to say there weren’t some growing pains along the way: Shortly after the release of Open Your Heart, the band excommunicated bassist Chris Hansell, the guy responsible for the most unforgivably caustic, phlegm-splatterd songs in the repertoire. A recent Village Voice cover story claims Hansell was shown the door because he couldn’t afford to keep up with the band's growing tour commitments, however, his scuzz-punk regressions were increasingly at odds with the Men's ever-evolving aesthetic. And playing a big hand in that development was the band's go-to producer Ben Greenberg, who was not just promoted to replace Hansell, but immediately placed on equal singing and songwriting footing with founding members Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi. To say he fits right in would be an understatement; his two standout turns-- "The Brass" and the urgent "Repulsion" redux "I See No One"-- respectively push the paint-peeling power-pop of Open Your Heart further into the red and into the rough. (The band's ranks have also expanded to include new fifth member Kevin Faulker, to satisfy their surging demand for lap-steel.)
In contrast to Open Your Heart's exploratory eclecticism, New Moon unabashedly plays to the extremities of the Men's sound. But the album counts as the band's most cohesive statement yet, thanks to savvy sequencing that gradually amps up the volume and ramps up the velocity. You can even hear the precise moment the band snaps in the middle of "I Saw Her Face", when the song suddenly up-shifts from a sad-eyed, "Cortez"-killing dirge into a ferocious, full-torque rave-up, blazing the trail for the album's decidedly more raucous second act.
But where Open Your Heart's stylstic diversity sometimes felt like genre tourism for the sake of it (the country song was actually called "Country Song", after all), New Moon's sonic dichotomies are emblematic of a deeper emotional distress. No matter which of the band's three frontmen are singing them, the Men's songs are pretty simple: someone's usually missing someone who's far away, or dreaming of a better place, and there's often alcohol involved. But over the whole of New Moon, you get the sense the Men are coming to grips with the men they want to be (loving, upstanding, domesticated) and the kind of men they have to be-- i.e., the sort of hardened souls that must spend most of their year in vans and dives in order to survive. As the album flames out in the psych-punk apocalypse of "Supermoon", the moment as is as poignant as it potent: Like the retired hitman in countless gangster movies who gets pulled in for one last hit, New Moon bristles with all the internal tension of a dormant beast that, try as it may, can't ever be fully tamed. Open Your Heart was the sound of the Men issuing themselves a challenge-- "I wanna see you write a love song!" Perro exclaimed on the opening track. New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled.
