So, wait – everyone’s fine with this?
Brooklyn’s the Men have been attracting some media attention lately. Not internet attention – the real kind; the square kind. The New York Times kind: in a write-up of their March 7 Williamsburg loft show, reporter Ben Ratliff vacillates between lauding the Men and disparaging them, although in the end he opts for the former. To Ratliff, they don’t stand up to close analysis. “You can wonder why the men in the Men don’t want to be better: better singers, better players, better riff writers,” he writes. “Reduce this band to its parts, and all the charm drains out of it.” Elsewhere, he notes that their songs “run beyond their natural length and just keep going” and describes their performance as “slovenly.”