3 out of 5

Label: Yep Roc Records

Produced by: Steve Albini

In the years between when I became aware of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and when I actively began to listen to them, my idea of the band evolved quite a bit. For a long while they were the group in the Kids in the Hall credits, playing the chill theme song; a kind of inaccessibly cool band, to someone who, at that point, didn’t really know how to get albums that weren’t promoted on the endcaps of the mall music stores. When I eventually worked at those stores, and my tastes were allowed to expand outside of radio and MTV and I got a driver’s license and knew how to get to the indie shops, S.Men became trivia that those of us with discerning tastes could chat about, though meanwhile I was off listening to Minor Threat and, like, ska.

But eventually, I also owned stuff on Matador Records, and Touch and Go, and knew who Steve Albini was, and then, hey, I’m still down with trivia and owning albums-that-look-good-in-your-CD-book, so S.Men became one of those listen-once disc in the collection, relegated very dismissively to “band who played the Kids in the Hall theme, and they’re kind of surf rock and recorded with Albini.”

That’s how things remained for a while, except that in one of my many collection purges, I had to accept that I didn’t listen to my copy of Sport Fishin’ all that much, and away it went.

Skip forward a while to 2016 – the year of Yep Roc’s reissues of the S.Men’s full-lengths. Some passing listens half-reminded me that the album was fun, but beyond that, I was hearing so much more than I had before: more dimension; more passion; certainly much more than them just being ‘kind of surf rock.’

Which is all true, when considering S.Men in totality. Their initial collection of singles / EPs, though scattered due to being a compilation, shows how inventive and skilled and enthused they were from the outset; their debut album is amazing: bursting at the seams with creative variations on their surf-adjacent themes, and pushing way beyond the kind of joke-rock vibes they occasionally gave off through their ‘tude and song titles.

The group had a long buildup to that point, but it felt like once they’d hit on more formal releasing with second album ‘Sport Fishin’, – they burned comparatively fast, and band members went their own (related) ways a few years after. Returning to the album now, it makes sense: as it sounds kind of full circle: whether through the direct or indirect influence of fan Albini, or via access to his studio, the group rather leaned in to that Kids in the Hall persona on the album: playing chillax surf rock. Steve is, for sure, a great match in terms of capturing their setup, allowing for a lot of depth in Don Pyle’s steady drums, and absolutely delightful roominess in guitar and bass, but I kind of get why I was able to let this be a listen-once album back in the day, because without the context of their preceding music – it’s “merely” a good album of fun, reliable standards, with some batshit awesome oddball rockers or more emotive takes dropped in here and there.

In short, if you came in knowing S.Men simply from their one-line rep, you got a really well recorded example of that on this release. With the Yep Roc reissue, you get some cuts from “Just Fred,” the Fred Schneider solo disc the S.Men played backup on, some comp cuts, and a single which has another Albini-recorded cut, The Jehrney. The extras are well-chosen to map with the above, particularly the Fred stuff – for as inventive as The B-52s were, they also leaned into a shtick, same as S.Men were mostly doing here, and “Just Fred” finds a middleground between the two approaches – and closer 16 Encores kind of says it all, as the group plays seconds of various recognizable themes… including their Kids in the Hall track.

Some lovely liner notes add to the set, but ultimately, my opinion still falls back on appreciating this album, but hearing it somewhat as a snapshot of what those of us on the periphery assumed The Shadowy Men sounded like – which is pretty limited, unfortunately, to being ephemerally cool surf rock – and then they took advantage of an excellent studio to make a solid version of that snapshot.