On Oni Pond

It may have been hard to decipher amid all the yelping and yearning of its last four LPs, but Man Man has been through a lot of lineup changes over the past 10 years. Which says a lot about why the band\'s tightest record yet also happens to be the only one that revolves around the band\'s longtime linchpins: drummer Christopher \"Pow Pow\" Powell and singer/keyboard-slammer Ryan \"Honus Honus\" Kattner. Here they play off each other\'s strengths—strangled Beefheart-isms, sucker-punched percussion, hooks that are weird and wooly yet ultimately quite wonderful—while keeping Kattner\'s track-attacking tantrums to a minimum. The pair emerges with a remarkably varied set of songs that distill its influences down to a decidedly strange brew. So while the shake, rattle, and wail of \"Pink Wonton\" is the Man Man \"sound\" personified, it\'s an outlier in a record that makes a point of stretching out stylistically, whether it\'s through rimshot dub rhythms (\"King Shiv\"), a straightfaced guitar solo (\"Pyramids\"), or a reverb-padded ukulele (\"Deep Cover\"). Here\'s hoping Powell and Kattner can keep the good ship Man Man stable from this point on.

Like every album from experimental Philly rock band Man Man, their new On Oni Pond finds the wolfish crew to be more traditionally tuneful and less grating than the last time out.

The album, while the least noisy and frenetic of the band's output, is not short on the dark character studies Honus has been writing since 2004's The Man in a Blue Turban with Face.