Having not seen Man Man perform in nearly a decade, I had no idea what to expect walking into the 40 Watt last Friday night, though I felt confident that the sheer, unhinged madness of the show I’d seen in college could only have ballooned tenfold in the interim years. Presaging this presumed musical melee, however, was Raleigh Moncrief, an electronics-heavy multi-instrumentalist who, after some initial sound difficulties, filled the room with expansive, dreamy atmospherics and a palpable fog of bass. If Panda Bear were ever to dip his toe into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, or poke his nose around the edges of dubstep, the resultant product would be somewhere in the California neighborhood of Raleigh Moncrief. Beat-centric enough to dance to, and loud enough to make you want to dance, he worked the crowd into a lather before stepping aside for the main event.
Man Man have ballooned all right, though not necessarily in the way I expected. The band I remembered leaping and thrashing about the 40 Watt stage in the early aughts was now so hemmed in by their instrumental armory that onstage raging was virtually impossible. Various members would tiptoe out to the stage’s edge and interact with the crowd from time to time (on one occasion accepting an Indian headdress from an exuberant fan and donning it for the duration of the show), but Man Man was largely self-contained this time around, their range of motion limited by the junk shop’s worth of weird noisemakers and the unexpected jungle of electronic circuitry (certainly more than one would ever expect from listening to their clangy, old world-inspired studio material) that they were lugging around with them from town to town. Despite this more stationary setup, the band never lacked for energy, roaring and wailing through material from across their back catalogue, as well as a couple of new tunes. Honus Honus and company banged every piano key, plucked every bass string, pummeled every snare head, and attacked every note played on their seventeen other instruments no one’s ever seen or heard of before, with boundless, wild-eyed energy and apocalyptic zeal. They may never escape the strictures of being a “weird,†“uncategorizable,†“niche†act, but I defy anyone to see this impossibly infectious and unique band play live and not walk away as one of the converted. In short, Man Man are the man, man.
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