ALBUM REVIEW: Men, Women and Children
Men, Women and Children are an odd prospect. Having recently shared a stage at Give It A Name with the likes of lostprophets and My Chemical Romance, you would expect them to neatly fi t into the current fashion for sharplydressed emo. For the fi rst sixteen seconds of this album, you would be entirely right: all you hear is guitar about to go to hardcore breakdown. Then it turns into disco, as the rest of the album carries on.
In spite of their appearance and heritage, Men, Women and Children clearly just want to have fun. And in the fi rst song, Dance In My Blood, everyone is having fun. It is a simply fantastic track, with all the requisite ingredients — an awesome tune, handclaps, cowbell, a chorus with seemingly hundreds of people singing along, digitised vocals and the like. Unfortunately, once the CD gets as far as track two, the awesome tunes fall away.
While the rest of the album is certainly good, and comparable to Head Automatica’s Decadence (having a member of Glassjaw too) nothing lives up to those standards. If you manage to get past this disparity, though, this is, at its heart, a fun album. It is not the next major innovation in music, but it is a good album to listen to if you want to dance. It is clichéd, but the band clearly knows this. The lyrics are silly. The production values are ridiculously high. But does it matter?
11th May 2006