Unga Bunga Boogie Woogie (Man Man, Mercury Lounge)

If George Clinton and Tom Waits had a gaggle of children, dressed them all as Good Humor men and abandoned them in a junkyard, they’d wind up a lot like Man Man.  A group of multi-instrumentalists from Philadelphia, they are odd, yes, but also very, very good.

Should George Lucas decide to fuck with Star Wars again, he’d do himself a favor by grafting them into the cantina scene.

Their music – individual songs almost seem beside the point – veers wildly from the dark carny waltzes that Waits and Firewater favor to Modest Mouse-like mantras to Yanni-be-damned Pianosaurus-tinged kid rock.  They’ll start banging on Can-type prog territory, then suddenly launch into surprisingly straightforward 70s-era white-boy funk.  But unlike the ADD precociousness of a Fiery Furnaces or the incompetent preciousness of a Coco Rosie, Man Man never stops being fun.

Fun with a capital Everyletteryougot:  You could fill an entire entry simply listing the instruments they play.  They drag more shit on stage than Carrot Top (and elicit twice the laughs) which does more than give them the car parts, cooking implements, and wind-up bathtub toys that they need for their sound; it establishes a presence, a forum, a set for their performance. 

There’s a superb theatricality to the group.  Everyone’s always doing something.  At times there’s so much sound going on that each band member is looking around for extra hands; the guitar player – who rarely plays his guitar – is two-fisting wind instruments, blowing back and forth between his clarinet and his trumpet.  Three of the band members drop their instruments and go to three different sets of xylophones; then it’s off to a four-man drum circle.  The vocalist/keyboardist plays a spatula as a percussion instrument, then gives his keyboards the Aunt Jemima treatment with it.  When the music gets simpler, those with less to do act out routines with each other:  The drummer runs around the stage coyly opening and closing a paper Japanese umbrella while being chased by a fan-wielding, droopy-mustached vocalist; in this atmosphere, it seems entirely likely the group is about to break out into a rendition of The Mikado.  They’d already tackled Grieg.

The vocals are largely unintelligible, which isn’t a problem.  The lead singer, who calls himself Honus Honus (according to their website the other band members are “Tiberius Lyn, Clinton Killingsworth, and Blanco Flesh Taco”), has a gravelly can’t-hit-the-notes growl that, apart from suggesting (again) Waits, lends credence to lyrics like “I was raised on wolves’ milk.”  The rest of the band sings sound effects, trading taunts as a castrati cartoon chorus or howling bestial wails.  Sometimes they make motorboat noises, like they’re trying to spoon-feed the audience mashed peas.

From the above description, it might seem like the audience is subjected to a nightmarish cacophony, excess for the sake of excess, but there’s a very controlled chaos at work.  Far from haphazard, their concerti for kitchen sink and frog purée come off as a bunch of finely-honed performance pieces.  The set is short (only about forty minutes) but filled with a vitality and commitment to the performance that keeps everything accessible and entertaining.  It is its own thing, very true to its slightly insane self.  “Why,” Honus sings at one point, “should I say what’s already been said?”

You don’t want to saddle this sort of thing with terms like “important” or “innovative” – probably because it’s not – or demean the group as a bunch of playful eccentrics.  What Man Man does is play real music, real well, and they put on a real good show.  Go, go.  See Them See Them.

Their CD (known as both The Man in the Blue Turban with a Face and Man Man) is a bit of a different creature; it’s still quite good, but feels more a by-product than an end result.  Songs are more resolutely defined, the vocals are more upfront (so you can hear things like “Her hips are like a warm sarcophagus”) , but it still aggressively colors outside the lines.  Even when counting off the doo-wop number “Werewolf (on the Hood of Yer Heartbreak)” they can’t follow formula (“1, 4, 2, 3!”); the album ends with several minutes of comforting beach sounds, waves crashing against the shore, seagull cries – but before fading out, someone in the distance starts screaming, drowning.

This is going to be a week of oddities.  Man Man last night, the expanded Tin Hat Quartet on Friday, a JaPunks fest at CBGB on Saturday... plus a new/old Takashi Miike flick and the long overdue arrival of Save the Green Planet! at the Film Forum.  At the end of it all I’ll either be absolutely exuberant... or running for an Ashlee Simpson CD and an Ashton Kutcher flick.

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