The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #220

#220: "Engrish Bwudd" (2006) - Man Man

Possibly the strangest song (at least lyrically) on my chart, Philly band Man Man's "Engrish Bwudd" documents the fable-like journey of a protagonist who was stolen as a baby by a seagull (straight from his Mama's hands) that dropped him in the jungle, where he...well, the story only grows stranger, and ultimately, no lesson is taught nor learned, though we do get to hear who taught Man Man what they learned. The band takes its lessons from John Kander, Paul McCartney, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, and the oom-pah rhythm of Volkstümliche Musik, and they filter it through the absurd, through Dadaist concepts, through a protagonist made up of equal parts Jonah, Job, Gulliver, and Jim Dandy. It's experimental music for sure, but it's experimental pop music, and Man Man have fashioned a keen melody to ensure that the less musically adventurous can still follow the song and perhaps have their ears and minds open to the possibilities of music that's not primarily designed to sell: in other words, this is art for art's sake, but it's art that's not completely indulgent, as it's makers have too much pop smarts for that.

Though the melody is absurdly catchy, the singer Honus Honus (the other members are named Sergei Sogay, Pow Pow, Critter Cat, and Chang Wang) uses his serrated bellow to assault, landing just this side of obnoxiousness, thus balancing out the sweet with the sour (which means critics can appreciate it, too). The band plays a bevy of instruments here: barrelhouse piano, kazoo, mandolin, tuba or trombone (I can't tell which), theramin (or something that sounds like one), possibly a French horn, and a few other instruments the origin of which I can't quite discern. The arrangement mixes all these disparate elements slightly beneath the main mix of the oom-pah of piano and bass so that the strange instrumentation complements, adding a richness (albeit, a strange one) of sound that'll have you plumbing the song's musical depths again and again just to catch all the different sounds Man Man throws our way.

And then, there's the drumming--it's wild! Pow Pow plays all over the set during the verses, rolling and filling and crashing sporadically, accenting the music, more chaos than control, letting the piano handle the rhythm. It's jazz drumming in spirit (though definitely not in letter), and Pow Pow's sense of abandonment gives the record a manic sense of excitement, that makes this one more than just typical alterntive/indie chamber pop.