The idea of releasing a "Greatest Hits" package for a band like Men's Recovery Project seems laughable on the surface. Emerging out of the scorched carcass of Born Against, Men's Recovery Project left an embarrassing stain on the face of mid-'90s hardcore, offering messy, aberrant punk fueled by primitive, farting electronics and a defiant sense of weirdness. This isn't the kind of band that lends itself to a neat career summary, which this disc presents itself as - but in spite of itself, The Very Best of Men's Recovery Project offers a retrospective for fans and an introduction for newcomers as fine as could be imagined.
Men's Recovery Project was wildly inconsistent, but never disappointing. For every tossed-off, disarming joke ("Man Urinating, Laughter", "Problem?"), they also offered a song that was fully realized, forceful, and even brilliant ("Normal Man", "Sexual Pervert"). Both halves are equally important to the identity of Men's Recovery Project, and the division between them is unstable (sometimes collapsing in the middle of a song).
Their music sounds like the culmination of the punk continuum in an alternate universe, as if hardcore had germinated on a techno-dystopian leisure cruise populated by mutant perverts and android oppressors, as opposed to in the suburbs of the United States. In the end, are these locales really all that different? Men's Recovery Project made a career out of pondering these kinds of questions.
A lot of these songs are as good or better than anything else produced at the time. The afore-mentioned "Normal Man" is an anthemic examination of modern society as crucial and epochal as "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Over bursts of frantic hardcore, singer Sam McPheeters is interrogated:
Do you read books and magazines? Yes I do! Are you concerned with personal hygiene? Yes I am! Do you like flying in boats and airplanes? Yes I do! Sounds like he's a normal man-that's right I'm a normal man!
"Clark in my Car" bleeps and chirps through a discotheque for cyborg leathermen, "Egyptian Assassin" rides a post-apocalyptic groove like an irradiated take on the Screamers, and "Manhole" pulsates with barely-contained Casio menace. I could go on, but you're better off examining these specimens for yourself. Sure, there are some omissions that confound me (e.g. "My Body is a Jerk", the eerie "All Music is Shit to God (Ed Powers Tribal Remix)", the Born Againsty "Ronald Reagan", "Like Me, For Instance"), but this collection is nonetheless as fine a chunk of MRP polycarbonate as can be found. In a time when parades of spineless imitators hawk emaciated indie noise and uninspired experimentalism, Men's Recovery Project is the real deal (like the one Antidote once exhorted us to wake up to). These are crucial songs for crucial times.
