Last Year’s Men

Last Year’s Men are next year’s big thing. The Chapel Hill outfit startled and exhilarated the local scene in 2010, blowing up like firecrackers in a kettle. Their debut, an audacious LP called Sunny Down Snuff, is a consistent and vivacious take on garage rock. Upon release, the Men seemed to have erupted from nothing.

That, of course, isn’t true. The members of Last Year’s Men honed their chops playing in a number of long-gone high-school punk bands. They, like any band, have logged their hours under headphones internalizing influences until their own songs stood as peers.

That the average age among Last Year’s Men’s four members is barely beyond 21 comes as a surprise, especially given the maturity in the band’s output. Frontman Ben Carr pens songs with the same sense of timeless pop imagery and understated wit that helped Oblivians/Reigning Sound icon Greg Cartwright claim legend status. The themes are hardly inventive—life gets hard, love turns sour, hearts break, shit happens. But here, they’re refreshed. Far from any good-for-their-age praise, the band’s youth is its X-factor.

“Paralyzed,” the album’s opener and one of its standouts, is teen-heat incarnate, bursting with frustration. You can practically hear Carr’s slender frame shaking violently as his hollers—“When I’m with her, I am paraly-ee-yzed”—fall casually into melody. In the kiss-off “I’ll Be Gone,” the rest of the Men join Carr in the titular affirmation; it’s a classic the-gang’s-all-here chorus, played like it’s the first time a group of guys ever shouted in unison.

Still, it seems almost certain that Last Year’s Men’s best work still lies ahead. Their live shows are short fits of bottle-rocket energy, ending consistently in sweat, smiles and giddy incredulity shared among audience members. “What just happened?” flushed faces seem to ask. Sweat-drenched tipsy neighbors silently reply, “Whatever it was, I don’t want it to stop.” —Bryan Reed