Surely it won’t be too long before some indie documentary filmmaker comes out with a work that refers to the number of musical projects that took shape during the pandemic. In that great bag of artistic stories, a phenomenon forced by confinement, anguish and uncertainty, this project headed by Roddy Bottum (worldwide known for being a keyboardist and original member of Faith No More, but also for being part of Imperial Teen, Nastie Band and Crickets) and her partner Joey Holman. The story is typical: we got locked up, we didn’t know what to do and we got creative. What is not so typical is that the path of Man On Man It continues to grow regio, offering higher quality material each time.
Today we deal with his second studio album, “Provincetown”. Respecting the coordinates outlined by the 2021 debut of the same name, this new approach in the search for its own sound is more consistent, more monstrous than its predecessor. Everything sounds better and bigger. The duo moves within a pop that combines guitars and keyboards, dirty and tasty, with different seasonings depending on the song, which make this ten-step musical menu coherent, dynamic and attractive.
At some point the thing smells like bedroom pop but without the adolescent or improvised touch (“Piggy”, “Feelings”), in another to eighties underground electronica (“Kids”) and then a leather underwear industrialist meeting krautrock (“Haute Couture”).
Although it may not seem like it at first “Provincetown” It’s a guitar album, here you can see Roddy’s love for the complicit distortion of the song, through a solid and convincing guitar sound. The highest points of this successful second step in the band’s discography are the opening of the album and the first single “Take It From Me”an industrial pop hymn in which Roddy raps linearly remembering that he was a mega kid influenced by Run DMC, a notable detail also in “Haute Couture”. the epic of “Gloryhole” and the incidental of acoustics “Who Could Know” they raise the qualitative bar of the group. But the most exciting comes with “Feel Good”, a whole manifesto of danceable life and later with the slimy and beautifully distorted “Hush” which closes the album and presents a luxury guest: J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr.