Album / Fuzz Club / 03.02.2023
Garage
In the big family tree of New York, we can clearly see the name of the Velvet Underground written at the very top, that of Bodega or Parquet Courts a little lower, and quite a few other well-known ones at the intermediate levels. On the other hand, although it has been operating from Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, no The Men. To believe that the group’s attachment to the city is ultimately more visceral than simple musical influences can be. Still, the quartet felt the need to materialize their love for New York City by borrowing its name as the title of their latest album.
If we were wondering where the band was after having seriously scattered on its previous Mercyhe sets the record straight from the first second of this disc with the very punk Hard Livin’ : a title that speaks for itself, of these periods of hardship that can dot a life, and the loneliness that often goes hand in hand. The confinement having been one of those painful moments when the city emptied, leaving only apparent misery, its idle shadow still hovers here when we thought we had moved on. Then the silhouette of Johnny Thunder crosses the street, under the dim light of a lamppost. Unless it’s Stiv Bator. Because to hell with COVID, The Men transports us to a much dirtier and more dangerous time, at the end of the 70s between Bowery and the Lower East Side (Round The Corner, Through The Night), when the word gentrification did not yet exist. You know the story. In fact, the punk rock proposed here is more than classic than ever in the group’s repertoire, but imbued with a sharp rock’n’roll, like Piece of Mind or the crawling and feverish Eye.
On the end of this New York City, we would go home and get warm before something goes wrong. But while the last bus slips through our fingers, The Men brings a little oxygen with the ballad Anyway I find Youone of those songs with Americana accents which the group has marked out on its journey since New Moon in 2013. The end River Flows, sticky to perfection and with that burst of heroism that makes you hold on when you get your teeth dirty, could also have appeared there at the time. Ten years later, through this concentrate of raw and rough punk, New Yorkers share with us their dirty and harsh vision of neighborhoods on the edge of the main avenues surveyed by tourists, and once again underline their destabilizing gift of metamorphism that has always run through their extensive discography.
