Dominating the stage under black sheets and crowding the Whiskey Boys onto the stage’s very precipice was a huddled, shrouded mass of motley music-making devices: drums and keys and synths and marimbas and brass and any number of other things that one could use to make music or -- at the very least -- noise. As the sheets come off, we in the audience are putting things on. There’s a barber shop/costume store mash-up on Harvard Ave in Allston operated by a Russian man who may or may not have overcharged me for a small palate of face paint, but I would have gladly paid a few dollars more for how much of a hit it was. Between the end of the Whiskey Boy’s set and the beginning of Man Man’s I and my cohort have succeeded in bedecking at least a third of the faces present in some approximation of a tribal war design, or some geometric reflection of the patterns painted on the drums. We’re ready to go. I digress here, but Man Man does not: soon as they’re on stage, they’re screaming into their first song, future-heavy and emblazoned with screaming, rolling synth lines. Man Man is power, and they don’t let you forget it. Before the first song is over I’ve already been assaulted twice; the fourth wall does not exist and I’ve still got the bruise from the drumstick. These men and their music are wholly visceral; they are the boys from Lord of the Flies, stumbling upon instruments they know instinctively how to wield and throwing into the wielding every element of raw, primal physicality that they posses. They are piranhas and the music -- even the audience -- is the wayward cow of hypotheticals. Frontman Honus Honus mercilessly punches his keyboard through a slew of almost indeterminable influences, something like a vaguely soviet rock and roll nightmare. “Can You Feel It” has a salsa-like sound, saxophone blaring out with a both whiny and sonorous merengue flair. Vibrophone, tiny cymbals, and maracas fill the void as the singer takes a no doubt well-needed hit of whiskey. The band carry on about him, all throbbing and thrashing and playfulness and screaming, circling with painted faces like some future dystopian tribe preparing us for battle. “Captain” rolls through like some epic and triumphant FATAL ERROR message. Their medium is crudity and discord and they execute within it meticulously well. “Shameless” is somewhat more subdued, following which we are compelled to raise our keyrings into the air, filling the room with a ghostly and delicate jingling, joined soon by raucous drums, rolling marimba, a slide whistle, and a costume change. Honus Honus, now in a lacy sequined shirt, jumps around traversing the venue, then returns to stage to pound some more Makers Mark as “Ballad of the Butter Beans” begins, over the nonsensical course of which red feathers are strewn across the audience.
There are a million more things I could say about this show. Every second is worth a paragraph and every note is full of enough layers to keep anyone short of Hemingway at it for volumes. At any rate, they leave us screaming for an encore, and an encore we receive. They go through, among some others, “Van Helsing Boombox,” a song about which they seem not 100% enthused but which we love greatly. Finally, the singer rests his mic upon the shoulder of a young man who’s been standing at the front with his girlfriend the whole time, then sings through soft and low. Marimbas, a flute, and synthy strings, an acoustic guitar and whispered harmonies lilt about, but the force of the rhythm -- having propelled the show to this point -- drums through the while. It has become our heartbeat, and even as they slow us down our heartbeats are still racing. We’ve become infused with their spirit, and if that isn’t enough (though it certainly is) the thrill of getting to see this band for free has us on the edge of frenzy. The very thought is as crazy as the band themselves, and as Man Man leave the stage we take into the cold night to become our own wild things.
-Laura Brubaker
.jpg?)
