IRT Magazine

Six Demon Bag is Man Man’s sophomore album. Since their murderously good debut, The Man in a Blue Turban with a Face, Man Man have replaced half of their band; drummer Tyberius Lyn and bassist/multi-instrumentalist G Clinton Killingsworth left to form Whales and Cops. The void left is palpable on Six Demon Bag. Gone are the splashes of percussion and odd rhythm shifts. Gone are the songs that constantly threaten to careen beyond singer Honus Honus’s control. Six Demon Bag is a much more controlled affair, with dark romps about damned love and doomed lust, dank alleyways and dangerous footwear. But what Man Man have lost in gusto, Honus Honus has done an admirable, if not completely successful, job in mitigating with lucidity (he does have the sense to ape a great (smog) line). There are real songs here, with real lyrics– a whole new bag, a Six Demon Bag! I for one never cared what the lyrics were on their debut; songs like “Against the Peruvian Monster” could have been about, uh, a Peruvian Monster for all I cared. It wasn’t about the words. It was about the expressiveness of the music & vocals, the stomp, the commitment, the howl. But judging by Six Demon Bag’s discernable vocals, and coherent lyrics, I wasn’t allowed to play by those rules this time around. So I listened on Man Man’s terms and I heard a good record, not quite the revelation that the debut was but certainly no sophomore dump. I heard a record on which the wondrous and naive children’s chorus from the debut was regrettably replaced by the grating sound of men trying to sound like a children’s chorus. I heard a record that packed the end with many of what I consider to be definitive Man Man songs. Songs like “Tunneling Through the Guy” that have a real rhythmic tenacity to match its lyrical menace. Six Demon Bag shows that Man Man, over the course of an entire album, can still capture lightning in a bag, but they used to do it in a single song. –Adam Silverman

Last Modified : November 20th, 2006
Filed under : reviews, rock
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