"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.