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Man Man - Van Helsing Boom Box
Six Demon Bag
2006
Man Man are a quirky Philly quartet I know little about. Six Demon Bag was an album I dismissed as an irrelevant and tiresome comedy album. Thankfully I played it again the other day and have gained a new appreciation of its rich acoustic tones. The mishmash of woodwind, barrel house piano, choppy woodblock percussion, sea shanties, the brothers Grim and the singers weary, weather torn Tom Waits style vocals all conjure up a feeling of a mystical past of camp fires and old pubs full of bearded pipe puffing fishermen. This is the one track that I’ve liked from the beginning and it’s still my favourite. The lamenting “Aahhh, Aaahhh”’s at the start of the track hint at something much different from Man Man’s usual kookiness. The lines “I want to sleep for weeks like a dog at her feet, though I know it wont work out in the long run” confirm it. And when frontman Honus Honus sings, "I learn how to speak a forgotten language. I fall in the sea but forget how to swim", you sense a man that's returning to a lonely life, searching for them elusive, supposedly plentiful fish, and drowning. And then we get one of the best choruses on this entire list:
When anything that's anything becomes nothing that's everything
and nothing is the only thing you ever seem to have.
That there is is pure poetry as far s I'm concerned, a man throwing in the towel, content with misery. The words are backed with a twangy, spidery guitar figure and rag and bone tip-a-tap percussion, and I could listen to it forever, though I know it won't work out in the long run.
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