The Men - Open Your Heart

An early complaint leveled at title track and lead single of Open Your Heart was that it sounded ‘exactly the same’ as the Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen In Love?’. Well, yes, good enough. It does sound similar. But I can state my counter-argument as plainly as this: I don’t give a fuck. I put Open Your Heart into my car stereo on the first sunny day of February (and, since the frantic energy of The Men has put me in a buoyant and optimistic mood, let’s go ahead and call that the first day of summer) and it was impossible not to gorge myself on the timeless power of generous, open chords played with plenty of distortion. Complaining about The Men plundering the archives of punkrock couldn’t have been further from my mind. Open Your Heart might not work from a dazzlingly new formula - but it’s cacophonous noise to be played at maximum volume; a record to be relished.

By virtue of having a discernible verse and chorus, title track ‘Open Your Heart’ distinguishes itself as having the one of the most strongly developed song structures on the album. Because, far from attempting to craft a verse-bridge-chorus crossover hit, these tracks are consistently more concerned with losing themselves in the glorious tumult of competing guitar and drum. Indeed, it often feels like The Men are only ever providing the bare minimum scraps of vocal work required to satiate the listener (the barely audible hook of ‘Please Don’t Go Away’; the borderline spoken word of ‘Oscilate’), justifying the high frequency of repetition within these songs’ simplistic structures; one quick hook permitting yet another go-round for duelling guitars to double-dare each other into adrenaline soaked frenzies. Take opening track ‘Turn It Around’: repeating a a tiny snatch of snotty melody every few bars just to keep the song ticking over, the band seem far more invigorated by the periods between the vocals, adding more and more noise across its central riff with each reappearance, building steadily over its running time and letting the drums loose for a victory lap at its climax.

But for all its scuzzy, blistering noise, this is no lo-fi recording - each instrument and sound enjoying a firm sense of posture and crisp definition in the mix no matter how chaotic it gets. As closer ‘Ex-Dreams’ fires up, the use of panning really compliments the space between the instruments, allowing them to spread apart and regroup for maximum impact as required. Or, on a song like ‘Animal’, where the guitars completely abandon the central riff somewhere around the halfway point (distracted with the far more interesting business of blistering shredding way further up the fretboard) the thing should descend into chaos - and, I suppose it does - but it’s deceptively measured and controlled, and rendered perfectly. There’s a clarity to the production which allows these textures to become as thick and busy as they please, but without being marred by an unwanted density, nor getting in the way of the organic sound of people simply playing rock music together.

The chorus of ‘Candy’ goes “when I hear the radio play, I don’t care that it’s not me” and it’s true to say that Open Your Heart feels like music made for the sake of making noise, rather than to impress the critics or to win new fans. In true punkrock spirit, this is The Men’s ride, and if they want to drop a slow burning ten minute instrumental passage just two tracks in, or if they want to undercut their own sound at the back end of their album with an acoustic bar-room shuffle, then dammit they will and, if you don’t like it, you can take a number and get in line. Open Your Heart is that perfect accompaniment to the turning of spring - a flood of punkrock squalor which sounds more impassioned by love than it does by anger or aggression; conclusively proving that sheer volume and basic frameworks can be the perfect vehicles for those simple-yet-important sentiments of anguished emotion like “open your heart to me” and “please don’t go away”. If you want, you can still complain about the structures being regressive, or that the band regurgitates its influences far too obviously, but I’m afraid I’m listening to The Men far too loudly to hear a fucking thing you’re saying.