MEN - Talk About Body

22 February, 2011
Written by Russell Warfield

Critics seem to tie themselves into knots when presented with a record which is simultaneously a killer dance stomp and a confrontational exploration of political/sociological issues. A review of this nature often descends into a linguistic combat between these two aspects of the record – as if the album is obliged to pin its stripes to one mast or the other, or that one must supplant the other before the review’s conclusion. An album must either be a frothily accessible piece of dance music, or an intellectually high-brow piece of polemic. It cannot be both. The things are mutually exclusive, apparently. So it’s great when a band like MEN – fronted by Le Tigre’s feminist hero (/heroine? Delete as ideologically appropriate) JD Samson – force us to complicate this binary distinction; and Talk About Body does it by muddying a few gendered preconceptions atop the rock steady beats of huge, electric dance anthems.

Indeed, the first thing you’ll notice about singles ‘Off Our Backs’ and ‘Who Am I?’ is the fact that they’re absolutely pounding party tracks. Usually, JD will take just a clutch of sparse vocal refrains, and then roll them over the top of a seriously propulsive set of beats for the duration of a rocketing few minutes. You’ll be so busy dancing to ‘Credit Card Babies’ that it’ll take you until at least a second or third listen before you realise that the catchy refrain that you’re singing along to goes “I’m gonna fuck my friends to get a little tiny baby” (a song which, if nothing else, proves once and for all that there is at least a little room for same-sex adoption politics at the discotheque). It’s the sort of insistently peppy, shout-along party music which can all too easily spill over into the realms of farce or irritability (the chorus of ‘Boom Boom Boom’ very literally goes “BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”, to give you an indication) but MEN largely tread the line quite perfectly. At its best, this record is everything you could demand from an indie dance act.

And indeed, it’s the obligatory moments of ‘taking things down a notch’ when the wheels come off for this record. Songs like ‘Simultaneously’ and ‘Take Your Shirt Off’ slink along without the high tempo or strident rhythms as if the bottom has fallen out of them. Without the powerful rhythmic grooves to back her up, JD’s vocal repetition becomes pretty grating; her lyrical endeavours become a little facile. The needless penchant for lyrical repetition and for getting from A to B with the most Sontag references possible results in these tracks clocking in at nearly an hour; a devastating blow for the sort of shape pulling record which could really benefit from being a friskily snappy affair.

But the energy of its highs (read: its singles) keep the record’s momentum ticking over, and – lyrically speaking – it feels somehow unfair to judge JD on her sentiment when she’s never given any real indication that this album is intended as a serious cultural manifesto, looking to rival the works of Judith Butler or the like. Leave aside the half baked queer theory, and the brief forays into beatless territories and you’re left with a clutch of tracks which stand proudly as some of the year’s most arrestingly insistent dance songs.

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