The Men
Drift

THE REVIEW

The Men is a project that hasn't always convinced me and, in some cases, I even found it absolutely negligible (off the top of my head, "New Moon" and "Tomorrow's Hits" come to mind). However, I remember writing about "Devil Music" that only idiots never change their minds, and that album was truly explosive and a record worthy of Blue Cheer, Sonics, Iggy & The Stooges, New York Dolls, and especially Replacements.

With "Drift" (set to be released as usual on Sacred Bones on March 2nd), those good feelings inspired by listening to "Devil Music" are certainly not fulfilled, and the album seems to me, overall, to be a kind of middle ground in terms of quality among all the group's other releases. Recorded at Serious Business Studios in Brooklyn with Travis Harrison (Guided by Voices), the New York City group led by songwriters Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi pulls an acid garage rock out of the hat in the Suicide style ("Maybe I'm Crazy") that immediately promises a lot and, in terms of atmospheres, combines with the dark ballad "When I Held You In My Arms". But "Drift" seems divided into more (too many) compartments: "Secret Light" is a psychedelic garage pop piece, "Killed Someone" revisits the "Hootehanny" fury of the Mats, "Sleep" is a dark and very sophisticated ballad full of echoes and reverberations, and "Final Prayer" is a cross between Spacemen 3 sound waves and the best Amen Dunes ("Through Donkey Jaw", 2011), while "Come to Me" pretends to be Bob Dylan. "Rose On Top of the World", "So High" instead sound very much in the Guided by Voices style and this is probably not a coincidence.

There are truly many great ideas at play, but none of them are fully developed and brought to fruition. Thus, "Drift" opens too many brackets on so many different listening perspectives and expectations, but none of these are satisfied, and The Men directly refer us to the next album or to revisit some of their past works to try to understand what their real identity is. Because here, this is not understood.