The Men are good because they sound like a tornado, picking up and dropping off scraps of sound like they weigh nothing. The joy is that it seems whirlwind, not collapsable and planned out. But they're also from Brooklyn, the land of the self-aware, so maybe they're accustomed to questions like "What are your influences?" When asked in a Village Voice interview about the new song and all of its inspirations, member Christopher Hansell had this to say about his favorite guitars: "Right now I've been obsessing over the guitar tone on Wire's Pink Flag. Obviously Greg Ginn's tone on almost all of the Black Flag records is a staple..." He's not wrong. The new record has, to a tee, both that gigantic crunching guitar BIGNESS of Wire records and the incessant forward momentum of Black Flag. But there's way more stuff in there, too. Remember Twister? Cows, houses, trees, everything spun around, and Helen Hunt was running around trying to figure out the monstrosity of the whole thing but by the end of the movie didn't learn a damn thing except that it's best to just respect the tornados' insanity. She had the right idea.
Download: The Men, "Bataille"
