Critics and music sites almost always classify the music of Brooklyn-based band The Men as punk or post-hardcore, but singer and guitarist Mark Perro said the band views their own music in much looser terms: friends playing whatever music they like.
“It really doesn’t occur to us to try to be something or to try to sound a certain way or act a certain way,” he said in an interview with The Daily Cardinal. “ We’re just kind of trying to play what we want and whatever makes us feel good. People ask about genres, but it’s never a conscious effort.”
Classifications aside, the four members of The Men have spent 2012 touring multiple continents to support recently-released Open Your Heart, and will be making a stop at Pitchfork Music Festival this weekend before continuing on to the West Coast and Europe.
Perro said he has found touring to be a continual cycle of ups and downs. It has offered the band a chance to see the world and connect with new people every single night, which he considers the best part. On the flip side, he said touring is grueling and sometimes starts to feel like a prison.
“For a lot of it, you become kind of numb, like you’re on cruise control,” he said. “You walk in, set up, you play. You’re like a lifeless machine. That’s when it gets kind of dark.”
While on tour this summer, The Men stopped in our very own city to play a show last month. Despite guitarist Nick Chiericozzi’s Oshkosh-area upbringing, it was Perro’s first visit to Wisconsin, and he had a chance to experience what we do best.
“We played a show at The Frequency, it was a good time,” Perro said. “We went to some sausage place and had beers and sausages, I remember.”
As for festival shows, this will be The Men’s first time playing Pitchfork. Perro said the band is used to smaller club gigs, but the exposure to new fans that a festival offers is priceless.
“I guess I prefer playing a club or a basement, but I like playing outside, too,” he said. “It’s cool to dip in and out of those completely different worlds and mix it up.”
The band also mixed up their environment recently when they left the chaos of the city and rented a house in upstate New York to record their third full-length album, due to release next year. Perro said the band will probably be on tour at this time in 2013, but that a year is too distant in the future to guess what they might do next.
“I hope to be in Boca Raton, retired on the beach and doing nothing,” Perro joked. “It’s so hard to predict. I mean, a year ago I never envisioned this, so who knows what we will be up to.”
The release of last year’s Leave Home compared to this year’s Open Your Heart exemplifies how much music and life can change in one year. Perro said the band reigned in their sound and worked on developing a succinct idea of their musical aims and how to achieve them for the latter album.
“Leave Home was a lot more about sounds and textures, a more abstract thing,” he explained. “It was left up to randomness or chaos or something. For Open Your Heart we wanted to focus on the songwriting and the sounds, to have more control.”
One thing that will probably not change in year: the band’s spirit animal. While Perro was prescribed an actual spirit animal by a shaman in Peru (an eagle), he laughingly assigned the band the essence of “a cactus.”
So what does a cactus-personified sound like, exactly? You can catch Perro, Chiericozzi, drummer Rich Samis and bassist Ben Greenberg at The Empty Bottle in Chicago this Saturday (July 14) or at their Pitchfork set this Sunday (July 15) at 3:45 p.m. at Chicago’s Union Park to find out.
