#1027 The Men - Immaculada

This is where The Men laid the blueprint for Open Your Heart, one of the best albums of 2012. All the parts are here, the noisy meandering, the atmospheric drones, the hardcore screamfits, the brief glimpses of honest to god rock and roll. The parts are structured all backwards though, leading with the artiest gestures and then settling into some comparatively traditional 90's underground-flecked rock, an inversion of the usual pop record structure that you can't help but respect, before closing with a breakneck title track climax in a style all their own.

The album's every kind of nascent, lacking any cohesive plan, but that gives it all that ramshackle punk edge. It's thrilling to hear a band respectful of rock but unwed to any particular notion of how to use it, thrashing with abandon against Can via Sonic Youth, evoking inconsistent legends like Wild Mountain Nation and African Majik, forging its own little slice of skittery strange 4/5