Man Man
http://www.wearemanman.com
styles: experimental rock
others: Tom Waits, Need New Body, Deerhoof
 Six
Demon Bag
Ace Fu, 2006
rating: 3.5/5
reviewer: p funk
The same tired tropes pop up in practically every Man Man review or article:
casting the band as a pack of rowdy cooks, placing their work somewhere along
the Partch/Beefheart/Waits axis of American mavericks, and constantly alluding
to barroms, alleyways, and other settings that seem prime for the romantic
sublimation of grit into narrative gold. If this framework does indeed describe
Man Man's project, then Six Demon Bag is merely the latest instance in
which the band's actual music comes off like a limp handshake in comparison to
the proposed ideal. Man Man aren't a flock of miscreants; they're a bunch of
kids who love to play dress-up. They don't align themselves with the Waitsian
ethos as much as they appropriate select elements of its style and form and
assimilate them into a more amiable brand of oddball indie-pop. And their
sleaze-encrusted stories don't hold as much weight as literature as they do as
AIM away messages (this album's prime example: "When anything that's anything
becomes nothing/ that's everything/ and nothing is the only thing you ever seem
to have").
The solution to enjoying this album, then, is to not ask it to provide heavy
drama, high art, or fiery revolt – it's just pop music with a slight twist, and
it's first and foremost about having a good time inhabiting glamorous guises and
histrionic voices. "Black Mission Goggles" sums the album up tidily (assuming
there's much to sum up in the first place): it's a rambling mid-tempo jaunt that
sounds eerily like the verse in The Beatles' "Come Together" and features
nonsensical wordplay that seems more interested in sound than story. And so the
rest of the disc goes, pillaging the Anglo-American pop landscape for firm
melodies, exoticizing them with dabs of dreary eastern European folk and
Morriconian swagger, and accenting them with whimsical, rhythmically-charged
language. When these elements congeal into something remarkably close to
conventional pop music, a self-ironizing tendency kicks in and reminds us that
the band is just monkeying around – see the mock-falsetto "shoo-ba-do"s in "Ice
Dogs" – and when a bandroom's worth of discordant strings, mallet instruments,
and horns erupts into utter clamor, solid forms quell them with their
inescapable gravitational fields.
Six Demon Bag isn't as zany as it is equivocal; it provides such solid
formal resolution that all of its pleasurable misadventures seem arbitrary when
viewed in the grand scheme of the album. Man Man sound like they're having a
good time, though, so it's easy for us to have one as well.
1. Feathers
2. Engwish Bwudd
3. Banana Ghost
4. Young Einstein on the Beach
5. Skin Tension
6. Black Mission Goggles
7. Hot Bat
8. Push the Eagle's Stomach
9. Spider Cider
10. Van Helsing Boombox
11. Tunneling Through the Guy
12. Fishstick Gumbo
13. Ice Dogs
 Man In A Blue Turban With A
Face
Ace Fu, 2004
rating: 4.5/5
reviewer: jonathan p
It's quite possible that back in 1970 when Sun Ra began calling the City of
Brotherly Love his homebase, something that his Arkestra discharged seeped into the
city's water supply. Thirty years later we're starting to see the results of this
exciting musical-chemical calamity: local bands like Need New Body, Dysrhythmia,
Espers, and Wolf Vs. have been slowly but surely bringing Philly out of the
musical doldrums brought on by the repulsive smooth jazz of Philadelphia
International Records and countless years of Boyz-II-Men prom dirges.
Now it's time to add a new name to the hodgepodge of Philly acts pushing the
proverbial envelope: Man Man. A prime contender for possessing the possibly
worst moniker in the history of music (recorded or otherwise), Man Man have
concocted a wonderfully eclectic sound taking equal parts from pure lunacy,
cabaret, seedy circus carnies, and Captain Beefheart (as is customary for
critics to compare any band that doesn't sound like Interpol to Mr. Van Vliet),
among other disparate influences.
On Man In A Blue Turban With A Face, the troop meld infectious rhythms
(pretty much every track), eclectic instrumentation (horns, synthesizers,
marimba, etc.), deliciously insane vocals evocative of a more pensive Tom Waits
("10 Lb. Moustache") at times, and a
cracked-out Screamin' Jay Hawkins ("White Rice, Brown Heart") at others. The
group brings it all together with a set of ridiculously catchy melodies (I've
had "I, Manface" stuck in my head for days) that retain a child-like quality
similar to that of hometown peers Need New Body, without coming across as
condescending or, even worse, NNB embezzlers.
All these elements combine to create what is a powerfully original sound that'll
have you begging -- and I mean this in the most blatantly sexual way possible -- for
another helping of Man Man.
1. Against the Peruvian Monster
2. 10lb. Moustache
3. Zebra
4. Sarsparillsa
5. White Rice, Brown Heart
6. Gold Teeth
7. Magic Blood
8. The Fog or China
9. I, Manface
10. Man Who Make You Sick
11. Werewolf (On the Hood of Yer Heartbreak)
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