Indie rock has been inundated with a lot of soft, precious personalities over the years, especially in the mid-late '00s. Thankfully, I feel like the overall mood of the scene has shifted back closer to the acerbic and raucous end of the spectrum, but in 2004 when the alternative and independent indie rock attitude was so very mild, so lush, so cozy, so timid, so adorable, so aw-shucks folksy, records like Man Man's debut come as a relief for those who don't particularly embrace the musical preferences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And by the way, Garden State was a shitty movie.
Not much is known about Man Man's history and its constantly rotating cavalcade of colorful members. In fact, I'm having a hell of a time trying to find a list of personnel specific to this album. I only know for sure that there's the ever omnipresent Honus Honus, whose God-given Christian name is Ryan Kattner, serving as the band's figurehead and lead singer. You also might have Pow Pow and Chang Wang, a couple of cats that I'm not fucking bothering learning the real names of. Without an actual list it's hard to tell how many or few people are actually contributing, since they each know how to play about 45 instruments and most of them might just be throwing rocks at various drums and marimbas. Knowing that the instrumentation includes, and is not limited to, guitar, bass, drums, xylophone, marimba, piano, Moog synthesizer, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, saxophones of various pitches, trumpet, trombone, tuba, French horn, euphonium, fiddle, violin, spoons, and pots and pans, at least you can be sure that the band is having a lot of fun with it all.
"Controlled cacophony" is a good description of what to expect from most of The Man in a Blue Turban with a Face (referred to as The Man... from this point forward). Debut albums from these kinds of bands usually serve to make a grandiose entrance and go no-holds-barred with the rowdiness, mostly as a statement about boundary-pushing. Immature bands will continue this formula ad nauseum and never evolve. Mature bands will restrain and focus the rowdiness in order to organically grow into their own. There's nothing wrong with going in guns a-blazin' at the very beginning, it's a very confident stance to take. Just don't keep it going, then that confidence turns into arrogance and you've pretty much got yourself a metalcore band. Yuck. Man Man is following the latter path so far, that of the mature band, albeit slowly; The Man... is for sure their most boisterous effort out of their five (as of 2017) studio albums, but that's not to say that it's just chaos from beginning to end. Man Man knows they're a bunch of rowdy boys and they're also smart enough to know about the sheer power of the element of surprise, that's why they subvert the hell out of this rowdiness expectation constantly throughout The Man..., especially at the very end of album with a dainty little doo-wop surf number followed by seven minutes of soothing ocean sounds!
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The album begins with an off-mike belting out of the first song's title, "AGAINST! THE! PERUVIAN! MONSTER!", and dives right away into the mix. A couple of measures of melody are played by some sort of stringed instrument, possibly a fiddle, and then this melody is repeated by a chorus of children singing "LAAAAAAA! LAAA LA-LA-LA LAAAAAA!" I love it! Pretty soon Honus Honus will actually begin singing, and you'll really wonder what the hell is going on. You'll hear lyrics like "I can't believe we met on this lonely crowded street" and "I'm hip to your hypotenuse, your geometric ways", and his cracking voice sounds like Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart going through puberty together. And he sings like that all the time? Yeah, kinda. And eventually the percussion section will just sound like a closet full of kitchenware crashing down like a slow, unending avalanche. And that's just the first song.
Now, the second song "10lb. Moustache" may make you feel uneasy because it sounds reserved and innocuous, but tense, and Honus is still singing like a desperate baboon. It also may NOT make you feel uneasy because you might have already heard this song in a Nike commercial with Dwight Fucking Schrute from 10 years ago. Nonetheless, this is other side of early-Man Man: nebulous peacefulness. Even when they seemingly play it straight with the mellow vibes, there's a certain air of discontent hanging on because Honus refuses to remove the gruff from his throat. The uneasiness is definitely deliberate. All the Frank Zappa comparisons you'll see floating around are apt; these guys are doing everything with a smirk.
If your joke band is also smart enough to be lyrically shrewd and musically capable, then CONGRATULATIONS you're not a real joke band and no one whose opinions are WORTH A HILL. OF. PINTO. BEANS. is really going to say otherwise (conversely, if you suck at lyrics and/or music and you weren't intending to be a joke band, then...surprise! Looking at you, Godsmack). I'll make a case for each attribute:
- Lyrically shrewd - The icing on the cake for me is that this band, with its crazy instrumentation and chaotic, lively music, is also smart as a whip. They'll bounce from clever wordplay ("Wearing that guerilla suit to try to scare me but it won't work/Wearing that gorilla suit to try to scare me but it won't work") to thought-provoking philosophy ("And they said I'm tired from waiting around for you/The reasons I start fires is that's what lost men do") to vague sexual crudity ("Make fuck like a dog bark moon/Make fuck like a dog bark moon/Woo!") to overt sexual crudity ("If I told you you're beautiful, can I finish in your mouth?") to heartfelt sensitivity ("Why do we do the things we do even though we know we are? Why should I say what's already been said better one hundred times before?") to complete utter nonsense ("You call me ling ling I'll call you panda fist/The sun burn like burn burn eye burn burn"), and it always sounds natural and unforced.
- Musically capable - The band is obviously well-acquainted with tricky time signatures and complicated passages. They also know how to use interesting and unorthodox chord progressions. They are also using a bunch of different scales, showing a particular affinity for the Eastern European and Middle Eastern ones. You don't get to hear that too much in American indie rock, especially ones that mostly avoid the old-timey folk influences of those regions. It shows that Man Man has influences outside of mainstream, which is always nice when you don't want to hear the same goddamn sound you've already heard a million times already. Looking at you, Godsmack. Plus, while the song structures on The Man... don't necessarily follow the verse-chorus form in a textbook way, most of the songs have some decent hooks and resolve in a satisfying way often enough.
While I do enjoy the album, and hopefully the fondness comes through warmly in the review, The Man... is far from a groundbreaking piece of high art. The antics can and do get tiresome, and you may find out that repeated listens may not add extra layers to the experience. Notes get fracked pretty badly on occasion (most notably during the trumpet solo at the end of "Zebra", for example) but you might not notice amidst the zoo of sounds anyway. The band's rawness and obvious self-awareness are charming enough to let a few flubs slide. And besides a few pockets here and there, the album tends to get a bit samey and you may find the whirlwind of instruments and Honus' raspy voice coalescing into a stew of sonic gray slush, especially during some of the longer songs ("Man Who Make You Sick"). Obviously, when you've been hooked everything will be like a warm handshake for your ears, but in the end it just feels like a bunch of dudes having fun and dicking around with audio equipment for 40 minutes. And that's fine for what it is, but it certainly won't feel essential or timeless. If you find yourself enjoying The Man... like I'm wont to do, you'll also feel guilty about it, as if it's music you should have outgrown by this point in your life. Unless you're, like, 12 years old, in which case just get off my lawn.
JUST OK
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