Pissed Jeans “Hope For Men” 2007. Sub Pop Records. The second LP by Pennsylvania’s sludge-punk noise rockers has been in our “should it stay or should it go” pile for several months. I finally took it out today after listening to a Pissed Jeans track – “The Bar is Low” from their most recent album Why Love Now, 2017, Sub Pop – which I liked a lot; that song was included on a Patreon-only Dirtnap Records Spotify playlist. I was hoping for more of the same, or at least kinda similar. Well….Hope For Men is not similar.  It is really dissonant noise rock, grungy but not melodic, often with no rhythm at all, the vocals either guttural and screamy or a spoken-word stream of consciousness (I’m not a fan of either style). Song topics include meditations on things like scrapbooking (on “Scrapbooking” naturally), the hobbies and tastes of suburbanites (on “The Jogger” – racquetball, area rugs, Whole Foods) and eating ice cream (on “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” – that one is actually one of the better tracks on the LP). Though the reviewer on Pitchfork raved about the album upon its release (“It’s an ugly sound– sometimes frenzied: the sawn-off boogie of closer “My Bed,” and sometimes totally entropic: the glue-huffing feedback-dub bummer “Scrapbooking”– that I can’t get enough of”), they note that “Pissed Jeans doesn’t want to inflate your sense of euphoria. They want to stub out enthusiasm like a cigarette on a forehead.” Maybe it is the fact that I’m listening to this in the hellscape that is 2021 than the year Hope For Men was released, but I don’t have much patience these days for music that is intentionally ugly and depressing. I mean, I can enjoy ugly and depressing (I love a lot of old-school hardcore punk and adore The Smiths) but Hope For Men is also way too screamy and boringly ironic for my tastes.