The Men: "Candy"

The track list for the Men’s excellent new record, Open Your Heart, doesn’t tell the whole truth. Though it’s hard to accuse song titles of necessarily lying, a cursory listen to “Country Song” doesn’t reveal anything even remotely resembling a country song—which, granted, isn’t in and of itself all that bizarre, since surely no one would expect that from the band behind last year’s Leave Home. But then there actually is a track that might pass for country here, “Candy,” and it is utterly incongruous with its surroundings. Singer Mark Perro channels his inner Jeff Tweedy for an acoustic number that serves as a reprieve from the all-out assault of much of the album’s best moments, trading abrasive shredding and top-speed cymbal work for more easygoing accompaniments, making clear that there’s probably a parallel universe in which this is a pretty good alt-country band that can deal in some pretty heavy riffs when it feels like it.

Instead of the single-line mantras that drive so many of the songs on both this record and Leave Home, “Candy” is a fully fleshed-out verse-chorus-verse thing, all about the restlessness and sense of loss that comes with newfound unemployment and being desperate for attention; in its most arresting moment, Perro sings, “When I hear the radio play I don’t care that it’s not me,” and he sounds somewhere between content with and resigned to this fact. Yet he insists that his voice is free, and, hilariously enough, it’s “Candy” that, out of step with everything else the Men have done up to this point, might actually lead to that radio airplay if they really want it.