Man Man – Engrish Bwudd

While arguably one of the best concerts I attended last year, Man Man’s repertoire of chants, palpitating thuds, and high-pitched rants is notably more than a ploy to dazzle their expectation-laden audiences. They’re a band that understands a gig isn’t just a show—it’s a chance to perform. And what a performance it is! Band members exchange instruments at will, xylophones chat up tambourines, and vocal harmonies conjure up images of eloquent pirates clad in white tennis suits.

But these aren’t swashbucklers or pilferers. They’re men content with smoking and drinking themselves into oblivion while writing the occasional silly song or two to pass the time, which, in hindsight, is admittedly a bit on with swashbuckling side.

Man Man – Feathers

Six Demon Bag opens with “Feathers.” A mournful piano begins its somber waltz as fangs strike and dig into chords that attack and decay into the band’s low-pitched rumble: “She feels like a stranger has come in the night and stolen her life and left her with this.” And this isn’t reflection, ladies and gents; it’s narration. They’re storytellers, this cadre of comrades, and their unison goes further than the synced sounds drifting through one ear, out one heart, and coursing throughout your entirety. They’ve a connection few other groups of their size share, despite their somewhat-recent acquisition of band members.

As humans we feel music because sound, quite literally, is the vibration of matter (and honestly, how could we not?). However, I feel Man Man’s music because it isn’t six men with six lives playing as one, but one man with six bodies playing as 100.

I’m tickled a fiery shade of blue as “Feathers” whispers to a halt. I am a tangled mass of particles zipping at velocities high enough to tell young Einstein on the beach (or anywhere else, for that matter) to sod off. But it ends, and I rescind my physics-defying hijinks in the dim, red glow of a projection booth. And that’s okay. As the band later sings in “Van Helsing Boombox,” “Well anything that’s anything becomes nothing / That’s everything.”

There’s still a tingle though, Man Man, and that’s definitely something.

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