Tomorrow's Hits

A few minutes into the Men’s previous album, New Moon, Nick Chiericozzi whooped “I got a rock band now and I’m on a roll!” It was a boast that would be out-of-character for this otherwise earnest group if it wasn’t utterly true on both counts. New Moon was the Men’s third winning record in as many years, and after years of sonic and personal instability, the quintet pooled their energy into being a rock band—one that liked their Neil Young loud, their beer plentiful, and their guitars in threes. A year later, the message on Tomorrow’s Hits is about the same for people who preferred to see them as they were on 2011’s Leave Home, revivalists of nearly every iteration of ugly and abrasive NYC guitar perversion, or as the comprehensive indie-rawkers of Open Your Heart: they’re a rock band and the roll continues.

As with New Moon and Open Your Heart, the Men’s accruing success lends to a welcome, optimistic outlook. There is an element of wishful thinking to Tomorrow’s Hits, from its self-deprecating title to the supposedly unintentional Big Star homage of the cover. This is the first Men record put together in a high-end studio, though we’re not talking about Capitol Studios; Bob Dylan and D’Angelo have walked through the doors of Brooklyn’s Strange Weather and so have DIIV and Total Slacker and O.A.R.. The horns that lace the shitkicking Stones rave-up “Another Night” are supposed to sound like luxuries, though Tomorrow’s Hits only sounds more polished compared to the rustic, cabin-tested New Moon. For all of their abrasive tendencies, Leave Home and Open Your Heart were loud and forthright and never sounded lo-fi.

Regardless of the slight upgrade in fidelity, Tomorrow’s Hits is much like what preceded it, with “the Men” serving as a fantasy camp construct for the record collectors making this record collector rock. “Get What You Give” has absolutely nothing to do with the New Radicals song, although it does share a taste for bubblegummy riffs and enthusiasm for music making: Chiericozzi literally gets out of bed only to chase the songwriting muse (on several other songs, they sleep in or don’t sleep at all). Even if the songs aren’t necessarily about them, the Men like to play up the transformative power of rock'n'roll, as “Dark Waltz” kicks off Tomorrow’s Hits with a litany of classic archetypes: a drummer with a badass, weed-dealing brother and mom buying your first guitar. This story begins in 1974, meaning that Chiericozzi would have to be nearly 50 for this song to be autobiographical.

If you caught them live in 2013, most of these songs should be familiar, since they were all finished and tracked before New Moon was even released. But they’re also familiar in the more general sense, wherein the influences are recognizable to both you, your cooler older sibling, and your dad. New Moon was defined by frayed acoustics and raw soloing, very much in the lineage of Meat Puppets and Dinosaur, Jr., bands that were descendents of Crazy Horse, but unquestionably indie rock. This is the real-deal stuff, BTO boogie, Skynyrd, and according to the band, a hell of a lot of Ted Nugent.

Say what you will about the Nuge and Grand Funk, they wrote some catchy riffs and the Men are still working their way towards their “Stranglehold”, their “We’re An American Band”. Which is to say that Tomorrow’s Hits hints at what New Moon also did—that the Men are great sonic emulators and merely good songwriters. And so, the highlights on Tomorrow’s Hits are the ones that recall the velocity of their early work. It’s easy to get caught up in the breakneck pace of “Pearly Gates” and “Different Days” and think “I bet they kick ass live,” but knowing how the Men operate, there’s a good chance that opportunity has already passed you by. Also, some of these sound too familiar in the sense that they’re kinda like older Men songs: “Dark Waltz” is a continuation of Open Your Heart’s barstool-bound “Candy” (really the song that’s determined their path ever since) and “Sleepless” is barely distinguishable from New Moon’s “Bird Song”, whereas closer “Going Down” sounds like “Half Angel Half Light” being workshopped before they found its bracing chorus.

There’s one lyric that sticks out amongst all of this whiskey-slugging and road-dogging, as Ben Greenberg sings on “Different Days”, “I hate being young.” It’s hard to sense much depression or even anger in that line, and not just because it’s surrounded by Tomorrow’s Hits’ most revved up performance. It just seems like the Men might hate being young in 2014, as opposed to 1978 or 1969, a time when doing this meant being centrist rather than on the indie rock fringe and having to explain yourself. Even before Open Your Heart dropped, the Men wanted to stress that Leave Home wasn't "them." But the greatness of those two records lay in how it was impossible to tell who the Men really were; they sounded capable of doing anything. And hell, being a solid rock band doing yeoman’s work year after year suits them, even if it results in very good records that get them right back out on the road rather than great ones. Who knows if the Men would be energized or completely lost if they took more time next time out, but Tomorrow’s Hits for now mostly succeeds in toeing the line between being on a roll and being in a rut.