{"id":6673,"date":"2018-04-12T21:34:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T01:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/?p=6673"},"modified":"2018-04-26T08:12:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T12:12:58","slug":"the-men-drift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/the-men-drift\/","title":{"rendered":"The Men <br>Drift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The_Men-Drift.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-6674\" src=\"http:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The_Men-Drift.jpg\" alt=\"The Men, Drift\" width=\"250\" height=\"250\" srcset=\"https:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The_Men-Drift.jpg 250w, https:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The_Men-Drift-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><\/a>For a long stretch of their career, The Men never lacked for identity, despite making a gargantuan shift to their sound. In their first phase (through <i>Leave Home<\/i>), they were noise-rock specialists. The subsequent <i>Open Your Heart<\/i> was their first dabble into the Americana sound they\u2019d pursue in their second phase. <i>Open Your Heart<\/i> was their breakout album for good reason: it ended up being the perfect combination of what The Men were and what they became. Then the alt-country identity of phase two that began with 2013\u2019s <i>New Moon<\/i> wasn\u2019t done as well as phase one, but they at least stuck to it\u2014at least through the next record, 2014\u2019s <i>Tomorrow\u2019s Hits<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>After <i>Tomorrow\u2019s Hits<\/i>, it became increasingly apparent that The Men couldn\u2019t make up their minds. You could say it began when they made a solid, yet poorly timed, return to their noise-punk roots with 2016\u2019s <i>Devil Music<\/i>. However, The Men\u2019s real indecisiveness is reflected in their latest, <i>Drift<\/i> (Sacred Bones Records). <i>Drift<\/i> is The Men attempting an amalgamation of all of their work to date. But this album is no <i>Open Your Heart<\/i>; while it pulls equally from each of their aforementioned phases, it hardly does it as cleanly. Rather, <i>Drift<\/i> is demonstrably The Men\u2019s most inconsistent and outright sloppy album in their repertoire. The disparity between their songs is clumsy, or more nicely put, noticeable. The two sounds of The Men take turns on <i>Drift<\/i>: the noise-punk camp of \u201cMaybe I\u2019m Crazy,\u201d \u201cSecret Light,\u201d and \u201cKilled Someone\u201d practically alternate on the tracklist with their <i>New Moon<\/i>-esque counterparts, songs like \u201cWhen I Held You in My Arms,\u201d \u201cRose on Top of the World,\u201d and \u201cSo High.\u201d (I\u2019m not going to go into the bizarre, wild-west psych triad that closes up the album.)<\/p>\n<p>As an actual album, it\u2019s hard to envision a more haphazard effort from The Men than <i>Drift<\/i>. It\u2019s also proof (if we needed it) that constantly U-turning on your sound doesn\u2019t lead to anything stable or recognizable. The Men would probably like <i>Drift<\/i> to be their prototypical release. Instead, it\u2019s sort of forgettable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a long stretch of their career, The Men never lacked for identity, despite making a gargantuan shift to their sound. In their first phase (through <i>Leave<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[34,92,431],"class_list":["post-6673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-reviews","tag-album-review","tag-sacred-bones-records","tag-the-men"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Men Drift - The Agit Reader<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/agitreader.com\/wp2\/the-men-drift\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Men Drift - The Agit Reader\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For a long stretch of their career, The Men never lacked for identity, despite making a gargantuan shift to their sound. 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