November 4-10, 2004

music

Freak Out!

hired guns: The men of Man Man come and go and change their names, but Honus Honus (center) remains constant.

Man Man is on the outside, breaking in.

by Nick Sylvester

Man Man wants to pee inside your mouth. Or so the lyrics go. Really, they want you to say their music sounds like Barenaked Ladies and their breath smells like the Doobie Brothers. They want you to name-drop Zappa and Beefheart and Waits and every other musician who had a weird voice and a 10-pound moustache because, yes, Man Man sound exactly like all those guys, and their lead singer looks like all those guys, too. Man Man wants kids to come to its shows, take their shirts off and dance around like assholes because the band loves that. They think it's cool.

Three years old (Man Man wrote their first song on September 11) and four members strong (Man Man have seen 13 men-men come and go, and even the steady band members change their real names to things like "Tiberius" and "Blanco"), this South Philly band wants to turn insider music out and outsider music in: "We formed the band out of the fact that we were all just sick and tired of going to rock shows where you feel like you're an outsider. Like, the band's up onstage and you're "privileged' to have them go up onstage and play their same fucking boring guitar rock songs."

Thus spake the jolly Honus Honus. He bangs out the band's keyboard melodies, he writes the band's lyrics, and he belts them like it's the parish carnival and he's a beautiful bearded woman. For him, the Man Man experience is fun and vaudeville, hardly calculated and never shtick. Honus genuinely wants nothing to do with guitar rock—"I put my guitar under my bed"—and it shows: Man Man are in their own world, light-years away from the ultra-trendy, neo-folk, neo-dance-punk, electro-country-hyphenated bullshit that has played itself out quicker than divorced women wearing Von Drunk to the Bleu Martini. If anything, the Man Man sound—which can jump from klezmer to salsa to avant-rock to avant-klezmer to bar karaoke in a matter of seconds—is highly personal: "I cannibalize a lot of my life experiences, so I think if I lived a normal life, the music would probably be pretty boring."

The band's debut full-length Man In A Blue Turban With A Face is so not boring. In fact, it's the best record Ace Fu has ever put out—even better than that first Secret Machines EP and that Ex Models album. Man Man shows are "fucking fun as hell, man," and Blue Turban does the band's live energy and confrontational theatrics plenty of justice. What's more, the band's guerilla-style approach to recording their songs has landed Blue Turban on the list of America's Most Illegal Albums: "We snuck into a music school whose name I won't mention. We snuck onto the piano floor, broke into this room that had 100-year-old Steinways, and we had a 2-hour window before the guards would check the floor."

And check out these song titles: "Zebra," "Sarsparillsa," "White Rice, Brown Heart," "Magic Blood," "Gold Teeth."

"I'm a newt," says horn czar Blanco. Whatever he is, two years ago Blanco kicked off a concert at the First Unitarian Church riding into the sanctuary on the shoulders of a yeti. "I'm also a visual artist," he says.

One album in the bag and a solid Philly rep, Man Man's next big plans are a U.S. tour and a great escape from temporary employment (Honus just started working a third job) and long-term homelessness (drummer Tiberius has slept on a cot in Honus' living room for years now). For the time being though, Man Man is happy to keep turning hater-heads like usual, an admittedly tough feat in the 215. But believe it: As one local told the band, "I heard your first song and thought, man, this is the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. And then by the end I thought, man, this is the awesomest thing I've ever heard in my life."

Man Man plays Fri., Nov. 5, 7:30 p.m., $8, with Deerhoof, The Advantage and Bridge Made Of Bats, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., 800-594-TIXX.

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