The Men’s first full length album Immaculada entices and repulses. Relying on a lot of current tropes in the “best” of hardcore music right now it also injects a lot of now forgotten or ignored sounds back into the musical conversation which is the punk scene. This has the effect where half of the album is a distinct rejection or subversion of the other half even while it embraces the rejected elements.

Immaculada‘s most extreme portion of Side A can be found in the blacker than black metal explosion of noise and terror that sounds like your ears rebelling against your brain (“Grave Desecration”). Two instrumental pieces, one hovers in halfway in tone between electronic in nature or is just a heavily processed guitar (“Stranger Song”), before ending with a nearly 8 minute long casual stroll through a battlefield that gives “Madonna; The Star of the Sea” a wide and expansive soundscape that is almost, but never quite doom sludge that also has the audacity to conjure hope in its clear and clean final minutes.

Side A of Immaculada is all of the worst aspects of humanity. It’s oil slicks killing birds, it’s the deprivation of rights to people different from ourselves, it’s a cancer that eats society, it’s every clichéd description of “the big city” in poorly written paperback books of the 1970s.

Side B, after an extended noise intro to “Lazarus” which acts as a flashback to what just came before, tears through the negativity, the darkness, the noise, the hate, the rotten core of what was to give us danceable, up tempo, upbeat art rock (post punk, post whatever) sounding more like the Lemonheads rather than Slave Scene.

The entire side continues in this vein.

Even at its filthiest, with say “Oh Yoko’s” epic ascending thrash lines, the Side B does not descend to the level of filth found on the other side. The first few times this was played, it conjured up the same non sequitor tension through juxtoposition of an unorthodox split project.

Yet on the final, title track “Immaculada,” the whole of the project comes together. It all makes sense. Where the “Ghost Rider” styled bassline repeats as the vocals shout to be heard, understood, from an imposed exile, the guitar spreads itself like the wings of a predatory bird blocking out the sun with haggard feathers. The Men draw from all of their technique in the album to craft this perfect, damaged moment in time, this five-minute travel through a darkened tunnel with something pursuing you. Something beautiful. Something dangerous.

Previously releases did not hint at this strength. Earlier songs seem like lucid dreams, where the music never seems out of the band’s control, but Immaculada’s fevered scratchings serrate these edges and is like being stabbed by Tiffany glass.

This is a beautiful physical object, one which argues for the continued permanency of musical product. In the words of the band, the cover is “hand screened, hand glued and hand assembled.” The screen above betrays what it’s like to actually hold this thick craft in your hand, reading the insert; trying to figure out how the quoted passage from Hesse’s Siddhartha relates to the album, or if it’s meant to relate to The Men themselves. Trying to find which lyrics are for which songs and what is being said in the songs where lyrics are not written for the audience to poor over.

Immaculada is a revelation, not in the “oh this is pleasant” but in the “oh the world is ending, here is a sea of blood and sky of fire” sense, but it’s such a beautiful, horrible way to die.

The Men have sold out of this initial run, but you can download Immaculada for free from their website. They’re playing Cake Shop June 19th and then will be going on a brief summer tour.