Men Without Hats

Some bands are so much better than their most well known song. Case in point, Montreal’s Men Without Hats, one of the quintessential 80s new wave pop bands/ The Safety Dance was of course a piece of pop genius. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of this band’s sound and ideas. I’m only really familiar with their material through 1987’s Pop Goes the World, but their first three albums ( Rhythm of Youth from 1982 and Folk of the 80’s (Part III), from 1984, are the other two) offer a complex landscape of pop songs that most bands can’t achieve in twice that many albums. There are a lot of interlacing themes among the songs (Pop Goes the World is a concept album with many refs between songs) which are hard to describe without many listenings (which are always fruitful). From a musical standpoint, the two most unique aspects of the M w/o H sound are the extremely atmospheric keyboards and lead singer Ivan Doroschuk’s voice, which has an extreme urgency to it, like he’s been to the top of the ferris wheel alone, seen the destruction at the edge of the universe, and knows there’s no way to describe it to you.

Here’s a live clip of their song Where Do the Boys Go off Folk of the 80's (Part III). Note the fans. This is exactly the kind of people who I remember were into M w/o H. Those are my people. And ya gotta love a band with two keyboardists. Ya just gotta…