Review Summary: Yesterday's Rock
The Men
would open an album called
Tomorrow’s Hits with an expository signpost placed forty years ago. Through their later career, they’ve consistently played up classic rock and roll tropes--power-punk chord progressions, guitar solos, sloppy joviality, and live, one-take, all-or-fu
cking-nothing energy--with unabashed enthusiasm, at their best sounding like a giddy counter to over-produced, sterilized modern guitar rock without ever getting stuffy about it. The only irony in the phrase “Tomorrow’s Hits” is the sheer impossibility for these songs to achieve that distinction, but you won’t hear any fretting over the state of culture from The Men. They’re jammers devoted to remaining immune from the zeitgeist, instead playing music for an older generation’s ideals: ramblin’ nonsense that seems to always find its way back to “baby, what can I do?”, under-produced but undeniably destroyed drums a la Keith Moon, solos Dean Moriarity would’ve pleaded with you to dig. Protagonists of 90s movies set in the 1970s would’ve loved them. On
Tomorrow’s Hits, they own up to their nostalgia-baiting revivalism, playing pretend with the line “My Mom gave me this guitar in 1974, it’s true!”, with “it’s true!” intonated more like “no, really!”
Tomorrow’s Hits is absolutely and unabashedly a dated rock ‘n’ roll fantasy, but at its best, it’s the sort worth indulging in. Its highlights are revved-engine barn-burners where every instrument feels like it’s holding on for dear life. “Pearly Gates” sounds dangerously close to falling apart, the guitars and whipped-to-exhaustion horn sections seemingly struggling to just play, let alone find notes--everything compelling blues rock should be. Elsewhere “Another Night,” plunks through an insistent rhythmic motif and lets the saxophones get all meaty over it, while “Different Days” serves as
Tomorrow’s Hits’ answer to
New Moon’s “Electric,” the track that recalls a Strokes riff which recalls a Replacements riff, and so on and so on until the origin ceases to matter. The benefit for The Men playing this sort of music is that where they’re nicking from grows less important--so long as they keep pulling it off.
Pull it off they do in spades for the third straight record, save for the fact The Men have yet to figure out how to make their ballads as compelling as their high-octane songs, and yet it’s likely that
Tomorrow’s Hits will also be the third straight record that goes underrated because it doesn’t build upon 2011’s assaultive and excellent
Leave Home. It’s an unfortunate part of any conversation surrounding The Men that they’re no longer noise-rock’s great white hope when their music kills in ways less ground-and-eardrum breaking than it was there. But as The Men indulge their love of classic rock for the third straight record, one can’t help but admire their willingness and ability to produce distinct and sonically tight records.
Open Your Heart,
New Moon, and
Tomorrow’s Hits are lumped together because they’re the post-
Leave Home records, but they each find The Men showing off a new skin, from
New Moon’s Nashville bent to
Tomorrow’s Hits New Orleans blues. What this means is that even if
Tomorrows Hits isn’t your bag, there’s always the next one which, if history is any indication, will likely be here this time next year.
