Man Man is by no means the first recent band to pander to a listener’s juvenile tendencies — the Arcade Fire was all about eavesdropping kids on Funeral, the Decemberists always have their tales of boys and girls — yet these bands tend to fall just short of accessing the more intimidating, even demented quality of a kid’s world. Handclaps and group singalongs are one thing, but sounding like a carnival-sideshow squeezed into a haunted house requires more than just your standard pop tricks. As for Six Demon Bag, anything goes — virtually every kind of musical instrument (both traditional and made up) makes an appearance somewhere, alongside cultural references ranging from fairy tales to Big Trouble in Little China to a Wendy’s training video from the mid 80s that featured a quartet of rapping cheeseburgers. The screams, the sound effects — all the chaos can be a bit overstated, and even on the best tracks, the band is just falling back on their cartoony sound. Though it’s definitely a solid, sometimes you just get tired of being treated like a kid.
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