Man Man: Rabbit Habits

"I wanna hold you 'til the mountains turn into

sand," Honus Honus croons in "Doo Right," one of the more conventionally

tuneful tracks on Man Man's Rabbit Habits. In fact, the chassis is downright

orthodox: Comprising an early-R&B; piano vamp and some intermittently

falsetto sweetness, the song is a palate-cleanser between the disc's less tenuously

sane material. Barking like a carnie, Honus and his fellow Philly madmen come

off like a troupe of demented, polyglot cheerleaders—particularly for Tom

Waits and Captain Beefheart, two looming influences that Man Man tries and

fails to downplay. But that gruff, disjointed weirdness is just gravy; at the

bottom of it all, the band constructs catchy, even soulful compositions sturdy

enough to withstand frenzied self-deconstruction. Where contemporaries like

Gogol Bordello and DeVotchKa keep the artiness to a manageable minimum, Man Man

has more in common with the sadly overlooked, primordially eruptive Old Time

Relijun—in fact, in spite of frequent dips into grating avant-goofiness, Rabbit

Habits

strikes a similarly winning equilibrium between quirk for quirk's sake and

pure, bacchanalian abandon.