Man Man's stage presence displays energy
Published Sept. 22, 2006
The St. Louis Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center is the size of your living room and furnished like one, too.
There's no stage, no elaborate lighting, no tickets and no bouncers — just couches, a kitchen off to the side, a bathroom and two amps.
I bring this up because I was within a foot of one of the country's most talented bands, and there is no better way to experience the crazy pirate-pop of Philadelphia's Man Man than in a place where the worst position in the room is 20 feet away.
The quintet's newest release, Six Demon Bag, is an intricate mashing of organs, horns, shrieking (sample lyric: "All I want to be is a shabbily, gobbly, bobbly goo!"), hurricane percussion and hundreds of other things no one could ever decipher. It comes across astounding on wax, but seeing it played live is a beautifully dizzying experience.
Man Man is often mistakenly thought of as a joke band. The members operate under stage names (Honus Honus, Chang Wang, etc.), and they list their influences as, among other things, Vietnamese hoagies, Allen Iverson and boar-hunting expeditions. They dress up in all white and face paint. But for every onomatopoeia and made-up word, lead singer Honus Honus pens totally arresting couplets such as, "When anything that's anything becomes nothing/ That's everything." And most importantly, these guys can fucking play.
Bands that run and jump and do scissor-kicks on stage tend to get classified as "energetic." The word itself is too broad in its nature to mean much. My mom gets energized when my brother hits a double, so I won't degrade Man Man by calling it "energetic."
What the band was, though, was merciless, unrelenting and — excuse the hyperbole — jaw-dropping in its technical proficiency. Man Man never stopped its set, and each member, save organist Honus who dabbled in drumming occasionally, played multiple instruments on nearly every song. Chang Wang went from two saxophones at once to a keyboard to a kitchen pot and then back again in a matter of seconds. Ditto for Sergei Sogay, who ran the gamut from bass to xylophone to accordion to keyboard.
The most incredible, though, was drummer Pow Pow who paced the show by beating the hell out of his kit. He furiously pounded on at least half-a-dozen conventional drums, but he also worked in cowbells, pots and pans and other various metal objects that he fished out of a toolbox. Watching the band as a whole revealed an expertly constructed machine but watching each member individually was entrancing.
Highlights were mostly off of Six Demon Bag — the relentless paranoia of "Young Einstein on the Beach," the spectacular mish-mashed drum circle during "Black Mission Goggles" and the swashbuckling "Engwish Bwudd."
But most of all, the show was striking in its humanism. Though the music of Man Man is far better than most of us could ever dream, its music's insecurity, heartbreak, triumph and emotion hovered thick in the air. Honus Honus' mom was there. His real name is Ryan.
They ended with the Six Demon Bag standout "Van Helsing Boombox." In an interview with Pitchforkmedia.com earlier this year, Honus said the group stopped playing the song "because it seemed to suck the energy out of the room." He didn't have to worry, though. Everybody was spent.