Review Summary: The record that proves the maturity of this interesting and innovative band.
Surely, Man Man is one weird band. Watching them as they walk onto the stage dressed in some skeleton suit made me not know what to expect from them. At first glance, it seemed just another poor hipster band but it turned out to be much more than that.
What we have here is not simply an alt-indie group, but a more complex experimental base is beneath it, with noise-rock and jazz roots: it’s like hearing Frank Zappa quarrelling with Tom Waits in a room full of synths and saxophones and trumpets and xylophones and God knows what else.
The single extracted from this fifth full-length album,
Head On (Hold On To Your Heart) is probably more accessible than any other song in here, maybe along with the ukulele-accompanied
Deep Cover.
It also offers a really nice, but (guess how?) weird video in which the frontman Honus Honus plays it all alone on a pick-up truck, while the latter moves around what I guess is Philadelphia, the band’s home town.
Back to the album, it is actually the whole work more accessible than the previous ones, which could be seen as a drawback by all the die-hard fans that saw them reinvent a little their style, but if it had to be said whether the music is good or not, it is. And it’s more than good.
The 40-second-long opening track might be not as good as
Feathers (the opening of
Six Demon Bag), but it is still an enjoyable introduction to the crazy and awesome
Pink Wonton, which creates a lovely pair with the following
End Boss, very intriguing and pleasurable.
Head On is of course the most catchy and immediate. It’s impossible not to keep singing it when you turn off your iPod or whatever your device is.
Catchy, but in other ways, are
Loot My Body, characterised by its wind-instruments and funky guitar rhythms,
Pyramids, whose cheerful accompaniment is suddenly broken by some distorted guitar noises, just to eventually reprise its beat, and
Sparks.
In the end there’s one short song which interrupts the alternation of slow and fast songs,
Curtains, whose old-fashioned piano accompaniment seems to project you into some lovely attic in the centre of Paris… Instead it stands there just to introduce
Born Tight another pleasant and enjoyable track.
The album works pretty well in its entireness: it’s solid and none of the songs is bad… not even just a little. Probably the weakest are
Paul’s Grotesque and
King Shiv, for they appear not to be tuned with the mood of the album, but that I guess is just a matter of opinions.
It deserves to get a
4/5 especially for the band’s originality and style, the musician’s ability and the variety of instruments used.
If this album and the previous ones don’t satisfy you, then you should go and see them live, because it’s really worth it and you’ll change your mind very soon. They put so much passion in what they do that it will be impossible for you to resist to their music!
Recommended Tracks
Head On (Hold On To Your Heart)
Curtains
Pink Wonton
End Boss
