Leave Home

iTunes Review

In the hipster borough of Brooklyn, four scrappy noisemongers called the Men have been mashing up and scraping out an interesting blend of hair-raising post-hardcore and discretely melodic post-punk (think Swell Maps, early Sonic Youth).  Vocals screech and yelp on tracks like “Lotus” (where the warped guitar din vaguely recalls the Butthole Surfers) and on the corrosive “Think,” but on other tunes, like “( ),” there is something approximating singing — though it’s pained, and buried. On the blistering “Bataille,” guitar notes blaze and blink like a neon rail, and the melodic bawling evidence some lineage to ‘60s garage rock. The bookend tracks alone define the true greatness of Leave Home: “If You Leave ...” takes more than three minutes to launch, and when it does, the song kicks into a churning brew of clanging, fuzzed-out guitars layered in varied tones, with a concrete, percussive bottom keeping the song on track. On closer “Night Landing,” guitars and snares pulses ominously, sounding a bit like Big Black meets Can, and Smith’s yelp is perilously close to complete mental melt-down. Hardcore never sounded this good.