Given the time (the ’80s) and place (Seattle, Washington) in which their career took place, it’s not surprising that the U-Men are widely acknowledged as important but little heard precursors to the nascent grunge movement.
However, a listen to the group’s music quickly reveals the flaw in this bit of conventional wisdom — they didn’t sound at all like a grunge band.
The U-Men lacked the allegiance to heavy rock that was at the foundation of grunge pioneers like Green River, the Melvins, and Soundgarden, and the wiry attack of their guitars was designed to slice, not to bludgeon. They also had a singular frontman in vocalist John Bigley, whose abstractly shaped torrents of syllables put him in a class with Iggy Pop, David Yow, and David Thomas…
…for creative rewiring of the English language. Musically, the U-Men suggested a stripped-to-the-frame hot rod built with parts scavenged from the Birthday Party and Scratch Acid, though it’s pretty obvious that guitarist Tom Price took those influences and ran considerably far with them using his own power and imagination.
The U-Men were a lot closer to punk than grunge, but their music was a lot smarter and more exploratory than the vast majority of what was coming out of the hardcore underground at the same time. And given how far afield Seattle was from any major centers of underground rock hipsterism in the early ’80s, the U-Men’s greatest gift to grunge was almost certainly the fact that they were willing to toss out something strong and singular to the world without worrying if anyone would care; the U-Men were clearly doing this not to be crowd-pleasers, but because this is exactly what they wanted to do. Still a legend spoken of with reverence in their hometown, the U-Men have been honored with a two-disc collection, boldly titled U-Men, that brings together their entire body of studio-recorded work along with five previously unreleased tracks. Nearly 30 years after the group called it a day, the material on U-Men barely seems to have aged at all; like the best rock & roll outliers, the U-Men created something that was less a product of a specific time and place than music that existed in a world of its own, and that planet is still a wild, fractured, and thoroughly compelling place to visit in the 21st century. An obvious labor of love, U-Men features beautifully restored audio and extensive interviews with the members of the group, who share their tales with a pride that’s fully earned. U-Men is a blazing corrective to the band’s perceived place in Seattle rock history; they didn’t invent grunge, but they did come up with something all their own that’s brilliant, challenging, and explosive. — AMG