Album Of The Week: The Men Tomorrow’s Hits

This week, two primal, grizzled, loud, messy rock albums come out, and I had a hell of a time choosing between them. I'm still not sure I made the right call. The self-titled debut from the Leeds punk band Eagulls has "Possessed," the best song on either album, and it has a clarity and an energy that Tomorrow's Hits, the latest from the New York band the Men, never really bothers to approach. But Tomorrow's Hits has reach and variation and some sense of rhythmic swing, qualities to which Eagulls cannot lay claim. It was a tough call. And I'm not going to lie to you: Part of the reason I'm giving this one to the Men is that I feel bad for not giving it to past Men albums. The Men are five albums in now, a new one regularly arrives every year, and all of them are worth hearing. They all play out like chapters in one long continuous story, one that starts with lurching, ugly hardcore and which is moving incrementally toward classic-rock majesty. Tomorrow's Hits probably isn't the best album of the bunch; that's probably still 2012's acrid and merciless Leave Home. So maybe you should consider this the Men's lifetime-achievement Album Of The Week -- our equivalent of the Academy granting Al Pacino an Oscar for Scent Of A Woman or Martin Scorsese one for The Departed. But Tomorrow's Hits, in its own right, is an admirably scuzzy piece of drunken roadhouse blooz, and it deserves its own plaudits, on its own merits. It's a back-alley blare that deserves to be heard, and that's ultimately why it's in this column this week.