| Man Man - Rabbit Habits |
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| Written by Max Ross | |
| Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 01:47 AM | |
 Man Man Rabbit Habits Anti- The sounds emanating from Rabbit Habits, the newly released album by Philadelphia quintet Man Man, are akin to something Tom Waits might produce, if Tom Waits were on copious amounts of acid. One could think of it as carnival music for the depraved, or marching band compositions for rainy days. The songs are mostly up-tempo collages replete with whirring wind chimes, xylophone arpeggios, and the occasional sousaphone riff. But grinding through every track is frontman (man) Honus Honus’s lead-dipped voice, which creates an inescapable feeling of desperation. It really sounds as if Honus (né Ryan Kattner) is scraping the emotions from the inside of his chest (or wherever they come from) and turning them, painfully, into words. Strange as the music may sound (and “strange” here can easily be replaced with the overused “refreshing”), Rabbit Habits is an incredibly mature, coherent album. Unlike their previous releases—2004’s The Man In a Blue Turban With a Face and 2006’s Six Demon Bag, on which they were prone to rush through the tracks in wild, disharmonic bursts—there is something measured about these songs. Though “Big Trouble”—a horn-heavy rebuke of some poor girl Honus Honus used to know—is one of the most random and spasmodic pieces on the album, it begins with a slow, linear trumpet progression that lasts a full thirty seconds before the anarchy ensues. It’s as if Man Man wants to give us a taste of the ordinary music that they will so soon dismantle. Though the lyrics, like the instrumentation, tend toward the nonsensical, the theme of heartbreak pervades the album. “I don’t want to love anybody,” Honus Honus croons in the leadoff track, “Mister Jung Stuffed,” setting the precedent for what will follow. Mostly, though, it’s a sort of intangible brand of heartbreak. The best songwriting on Rabbit Habits comes on “Doo Right”: “I can’t breathe underwater, like I used to, before I met you,” Honus sings. And even though it’s a little abstract, the point he’s getting at—suffocation within a relationship (right?)—is easily understood. Given Man Man’s extraterrestrial aesthetic, it’s a little strange that they should be singing about something so commonplace as relationship-induced grief. But by the sheer originality of their sound, they make even this topic original, too. It’s as if Man Man (in this sentence the band will take on a singular personality) is on Mars with his girlfriend, and his girlfriend breaks up with him, and then he makes music that is as influenced by sour romance as by his exotic Martian landscape. But making this Martian landscape relatable—that’s hard to do. But again and again on Rabbit Habits, Man Man accomplishes exactly that: With their music they provide us with something unknown and mysterious, and though it’s a bit strange at first, once the style settles in, it becomes something you may never want to give up. COMING UP: Man Man with Yeasayer. Friday, April 18. Varsity Theater. 8pm. $14. 18+. |
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