THE MEN - Devil Music

Like devils, Perro and Chiericozzi love to mess with us: after making us believe they'd found redemption on the more classic, institutional path of garage-southern-rock, they return without warning to the rugged and far less reassuring post-hardcore trails of their debut.

You can never trust certain New York musicians: just when you think they're drawing up the paperwork for a comfortable career free of major upheavals, on their sixth album they find the strength to wipe the slate clean and start over, with a record that burns as if it had been made by a bunch of twenty-somethings.

The first four tracks unleash an incurable rage and an unexpected new jolt of electricity, a sensational barrage that only finds temporary calm with the more rounded "Patterns" (fittingly, the fifth track on the record) and with the minute-and-change acoustic interlude that gives the whole collection its name.

Just reading the tracklist is enough to sense how this musical package is a time bomb ready to go off at any moment: "Crime" (a minute and fifty-six seconds straight out of the circles of hell), "Violate", "Gun" and "Fire" can hardly be mistaken for titles fit for a convent school.

The sound is always punishingly powerful, an incandescent magma that hits its highest temperatures on the hyper-distorted "Lion's Den" and "Hit The Ground", diabolical final solutions in which it's almost impossible to tell the guitars from the sax.

"Devil Music" is highly flammable material, music that's certainly not meant for anyone looking for a sedative to help them sleep, a lashing that marks the band's departure from the prestigious Sacred Bones to launch their own newborn label, We Are The Men, into orbit, a nod back to the band's first EP.

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23/11/2016