Brooklyn crew The Men have announced the upcoming release of their fourth album and follow-up to last year’s widely acclaimed Open Your Heart. Entitled New Moon, it will be released on 4th March through Sacred Bones. For anyone who’s been following their thrashy, fuzzed-out trajectory over the past couple of years the arrival of a new album will be welcome news – 2011’s Leave Home album was a blinder and they’ve played some scorching live shows in the time period since.
For New Moon, the band moved their studio out of Brooklyn and relocated to Big Indian, NY. "Entering with only the most skeletal sketches, the house was selected as an incubator for its
technical limitations, 32-hour orbit and predisposal to celestial intervention," says the text accompanying the album’s release, somewhat cryptically. The core of the band remains the same – guitarists Nick Chiericozzi and Mark Perro, alongside drummer Rich Samis – but they’ve been officially joined by Ben Greenberg on bass, and are joined for the album by Kevin Faulkner on lap steel and guitar, bass and supporting vocals.
"The Men’s oft-cited commitment to their ‘no-one-is-frontman’ maxim surely insists itself all the
more emphatically here…," continues the press release, "so much so that it practically creates a new band in the process. This unique situation induces a fresh fluidity amongst their roles and instrumentation, allowing for an expansion of palette and a contraction of focus. Piano, mandolin, harmonica, four-part vocal harmonies and even no-input harsh noise all weave their way through New Moon. Spiritually, it is hedged with as much leaden dirge and ecstatic abandon, as it is genuine saccharine steel-string levity, and an ever-tightening, no apologies pop concision."
And to hear what that description translates to musically, you can listen to a song taken from New Moon, entitled ‘Electric’, below.
