The Men: Leave Home

Label: Sacred Bones

Owners of the best first song on any rock record released this year -- you can take that to the bank -- NYC quartet the Men made a significant splash in 2011 with their first widely distributed album, Leave Home. Let's spend a minute on that opening track, a sprawling seven-minute epic called "If You Leave": No OMD cover, this; a few minutes of guitar-tones ebbing and flowing leads into a blood-raising cacophony of melody and noise, worthy of comparisons to your Bloody Valentines and Dinosaurs in both scope and scale. It's stupefying and gorgeous, and there's no way the rest of the album could possibly live up to it -- and the band seems to have understood this, so they didn't try to. The following "Lotus" smashes its head on the punk rock, a furious but straight-ahead charge through the same massively blown-out guitar sound they offered on "If You Leave." The surprises aren't over though: Spacemen 3's classic "Revolution" gets dragged into the fray on a song titled "( )," while "Bataille" indicates every important hardcore lesson has been taken to heart. One of the rock records of the year, in this town or any other.