If all you’ve ever really wanted from American independent rock is more—more experimentation, more tinkering with boundaries, more pre-, post-, or meta-anything—your prescription is ready. Using brass, woodwinds, noisy guitar, squealing keyboards, loping drums, and honky-tonk piano, Man Man nod to antecedents (think Captain Beefheart by way of the Cramps, or a junkshop bohemian Elvis Costello) without really sounding like any of their influences. Vocals are frequently distorted, when not buried in haphazard harmonies (if you can call them that). Piano bar ballads and Kurt Weill cabaret numbers are crashed with rockabilly flourishes, vocoders, and pogoing synth. It’s defiantly weird. Such aggressive genre-blending can have the unintended effect of making all songs sound the same. Once you know you’re getting everything and the kitchen sink, the presence of the said sink no longer carries any surprise. At 13 tracks, Rabbit Habits might overstay its welcome by a song or two. The rambling, overstuffed nature of the album is, in fact, interwoven with its very identity.
– Lyam White
Man Man: www.wearemanman.com
ANTI-: www.anti.com