AEM100 Man&Dog

It’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive of how weirdly smashed together all of our cul­ture is that a band as back porch sound­ing as Baltimore’s Man&Dog could have got­ten their first big push in an Urban Out­fit­ters con­test. It would be bad faith, by which I mean bull­shit, for me to say that this makes them any less legit than any other band, for while there are a lot of folks out there try­ing to make pop music that is Art, they are all still try­ing to make popular music, and a UO con­test is as good a short­cut to renown as any. And though the band sounds like a cou­ple of kids straight out of the mid­west, with our unlim­ited access these days to any kind of music we might desire, aes­thet­ics (in Man&Dog’s case the dropped ‘g’s and acoustic strums and growly vocals) have largely become a choice, rather than the inher­i­tance they used to be.

Man&Dog may eschew the elec­tronic tex­tures usu­ally asso­ci­ated with their city, but there is plenty that’s worth­while and mod­ern in their music.  First, (it’s ter­ri­ble that I have to say this, but I do) they can actu­ally play their instru­ments and sing exactly the way they are now doing through your head­phones (check out some of the videos of the band play­ing their songs, there are no record­ing tricks going on here). Sec­ond, the band exists in a lyri­cal world that, for all its tree­tops and rolling seas, also includes mod­ern things like turn­pikes and pre­scrip­tion pills. Images of the nat­ural world will never lose res­o­nance for us, hav­ing roots deeper than any­thing we could pos­si­bly impose on them, but still it can be tir­ing to hear peo­ple who have clearly lived their whole lives in cities and art school dorms rhap­sodiz­ing about spar­rows and fig trees (I guess it’s touch­ing in that it’s such a clear man­i­fes­ta­tion of a long­ing for some­thing more solid and pure than the rel­a­tivis­tic cul­tural chaos in which we’ve grown up, but it’s still hard to take seri­ously), so it’s nice to hear that Man&Dog are right here in the mod­ern world along with the rest of us. And third, the band plays with form in the pop song in a way that doesn’t inter­fere with the pure plea­sure of big cho­ruses and vocal har­monies, but takes those things and sub­tly stretches them out in unob­tru­sive yet sat­is­fy­ing ways. It makes the bands songs stand up to a lot of repeated lis­ten­ing with­out becom­ing cloying.

As I men­tioned, these tracks sound almost exactly the way the band sounds live (although gui­tarists Sean Mer­cer and Danny Townsend, who share lead vocal duties, seem more tempted to burst into solos in the live set­ting) to the point that if you told me they’d been recorded with the full band all together in a room, I’d believe you. This is a huge com­pli­ment. Man&Dog know what they are doing. When I saw them play live, there was an atmos­phere of play­ful­ness that only exists in bands who are infi­nitely com­fort­able with one another and with their instru­ments, which makes it kind of aston­ish­ing that they’ve only really existed since the spring of 2009. Mid­way through the set, the band had a brief con­fer­ence and then paraded through the crowd over to a beat up upright piano to play a song they’d appar­ently writ­ten on a break from paint­ing a house together (which sounds so made up that it’s obvi­ously true), a song they’d never played live before, and, lean­ing aim­lessly on the piano and wall nearby, they pro­ceeded to nail the har­monies as if they’d been play­ing it for years. It was a gor­geous moment, some­how made even more gor­geous by the drunken audi­ence mur­mur that threat­ened to drown the unam­pli­fied sound.

A-side “All Day With No Rest” is a lovely melan­choly strum­mer with a per­fect cho­rus that hangs weight­less above the rolling gui­tars like clouds in the sum­mer sky (Man&Dog have a knack for this kind of cho­rus; check out their song “Brake­man” for another exam­ple). The way the melody first resolves down on hide and then up on die is the kind of lit­tle touch that makes pop songs so won­der­ful. There’s also some­thing badass about the second-person lyrics that fits neatly with the rough­ness of the voices (rough­ness being some­thing that I mean only to refer to tex­ture, for the singing is sel­dom even an iota out of tune, even when they break into the big, three part par­al­lel har­monies). One of the remark­able things about “All Day” is that while it tum­bles along with the ease of any num­ber of folk rock songs, the form is actu­ally quite unusual. Instead of sim­ply pin­balling between verses and cho­ruses, the band trots out five dif­fer­ent sec­tions over the course of four min­utes, with sub­tle alter­ations in feel (notice, for exam­ple, the way the tam­bourine enters on the I don’t need your med­i­cine sec­tion, and the way Eric Piccirelli’s upright bass devi­ates at the same moment from its coun­tri­fied one three pat­tern to one that matches the new strum­ming) and yet the song never sounds patched together or com­posed. It sounds just as nat­ural and easy as if they wrote it while, say, mow­ing the lawn.

B-side “A Boat’ll Abide” has a lit­tle bit less coun­try and a lit­tle more indie rock to it, from the even eighth note feel and the asym­met­ri­cal drum part to the fact that it starts with a field record­ing of the announce­ments in a Ger­man train sta­tion. The verse includes a curve­ball of a sec­ond chord that the band nav­i­gates seam­lessly and melod­i­cally before the thump­ing bass drum enters to pro­pel it into the cho­rus. My favorite moment is the sec­ond iter­a­tion of the cho­rus, in which the band sud­denly drops out, leav­ing the line we are puz­zling peo­ple to rise up like a moun­tain from the map of the song. Lyri­cally, like “All Day,” “Boat” hints at love and mor­tal­ity but remains just vague enough to seem wiser than any sin­gle plucked line could illus­trate (it’s also a well known fact that any­thing sounds pro­found if it’s ren­dered in heart­break­ing four part har­mony). There is a warmth that radi­ates from both songs, some­thing that comes par­tially from the acoustic, strum­ming in the park sound of the instru­men­ta­tion, but par­tially from the atti­tude of the lyrics. The songs touch on seri­ous­ness, but they’re never mired in it. They find space for word­play (the puddle/puzzle jump in the cho­rus of “Boat”) and opti­mism (There’s a road just a lit­tle bit far­ther). It’s a mix of dark and light that makes Man&Dog per­fect for spring and fall. They encap­su­late the hope­ful melan­choly of the chang­ing sea­sons that is so addictive.

It’s no coin­ci­dence that Man&Dog con­clude their bio, after the usual list of their accom­plish­ments, with the note that they are work­ing on expand­ing the range of their music in the time to come. The fact that the band openly talks of want­ing to do more than they’re cur­rently doing is won­der­ful and rare. This should be the ambi­tion of all bands: to make some­thing bet­ter than what they’ve already made. Thank­fully, Man&Dog know this, and these great songs will only be the start of a long arc of great songs.

Gabe Birn­baum

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