Man Man - Rabbit Habits

It’s a blessing and a curse for a band to have a great live show. Otherworldly stage performances rarely translate well onto record, where studios are adept at stripping bands of their intangible charisma.

Man Man occupies that perilous position, with a carnivalistic live show in which the Philadelphia band has been known to dress in white and wear war paint while using all sorts of instruments and non-instruments. It’s eye-catching and exhilarating, what a PR flack would rush to call not just a concert, but an “experience.” (The experience is coming to the Wexner Center April 15 with Yeasayer.)

Rabbit Habits, Man Man’s new release on Anti-, avoids that great-on-stage-dud-on-tape pitfall, ably capturing the band’s one-of-a-kind circus rock. It’s filled with the kind of waltzy songs that can only be sung by a man with a large mustache, which singer Ryan Kattner usually sports. Kattner goes by the Man Man stage name Honus Honus; Chang Wang, Sergei Sogay, Cougar and Pow Wow round out the rest of the multi-instrumentalists. Sure, it’s gimmicky, but with music this freakin’ fun, it’s fine by me.

Captain Beefheart and label mate Tom Waits are the obvious touchstones for Man Man’s sound, more so because of the Philly fivesome’s shared love (or obsession) with the avant-garde than because of a similar sound. Rabbit Habits would be a good soundtrack for an absinthe-only party celebrating the 67th anniversary of the “Pink Elephants on Parade” song from Dumbo, hosted by the Association of Pirates and Ringmasters.

But even with all the antics, the album rarely delves into cacophony. It’s boisterous, cluttered and sometimes more than a little desafinado, but there’s almost always a singable melody driving the unruly tunes. “Doo Right” and the title track could even pass for straightforward piano pop songs. Like the band’s live shows, most of the tracks bleed into the next, slowly transforming a dirge into a celebration or vice versa.

Man Man toured with Modest Mouse at the end of last year, and Kattner’s vocals at times suggest a more gruff, barbaric version of Isaac Brock’s The Lonesome Crowded West-era caterwauls, especially on “Big Trouble,” one of the standouts. The song finds Kattner lamenting with ardor that his lover makes him feel like a zombie, and it also features the best lyric on the album: “You look bodacious in that guillotine.” When the band breaks into a Frankie Valli falsetto chant for the coda (“You walk like a man, but you talk like a fool/You strut like a stallion, but you hump like a mule”), the track becomes certifiably addictive.

“Top Drawer” and “Hurly Burly” are similarly habit-forming, and the 8-minute-plus track “Poor Jackie” enthralls with its disturbing tale of a female serial killer. The song eventually melds into a juke-joint jam, which is then dismantled into horn blurts and female chants of “There ain’t no God here, as far as I can see.”

So it’s not all fun and games. Some of this is penetrating stuff. The closer, “Whalebones,” is a heartbreaking picture of a man desperately trying to save a doomed relationship. “He holds her, though she’s broken,” Kattner plaintively intones. “He swears he don’t care where she’s been. He’s tired of being human. He wears her close to the bone as though she were his own skin.” But after reaching for her, “she slips through the wind like blackened sails.” Meanwhile, playing the role of Greek chorus underneath it all, elegiac women sing, “Who are we to love at all?”

Whew. Heavy stuff. Good thing you can always go back and cleanse the palate with a playful, xylophone-heavy song like “The Ballad of Butter Beans.” With a band like Man Man, there are always two sides of the coin. Otherwise it would just be called Man.

Rabbit Habits is out Tuesday.