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Man The Hunter “Take My Train”

Sounding like prom music that has been resuscitated up off a gym floor at first crack is probably a real fantastic idea. If this were prom night and we were Man the Hunter’s prom date, then later on that evening, when he tries to slide his hand up our dress, we’d have to take this novel approach (to his music) into consideration when the decision needs to be made whether or not we let him get to third base. In this case third base is if the song “Take My Train” gets listened to this summer or not. A home run is someone actually paying for it after visiting his bandcamp when it’s all over.

The precise gym floor where Man the Hunter put his moves on us is somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been doing something officially since 2009 and upon seeing it live last week, maybe the “cool idea” can only really happen in his bedroom. In our heads the tuxedo of what Man The Hunter’s sound fills out is the stuff of hard chin lines, quaffed hair and really really cowboy sized hands, but with smooth, delicate knuckles that’ll feel so good later on – that is if he plays his cards right and makes with Amaretto. Oh God, we thought, please let it be more than just one night only.

So exactly what is “the big idea”? Well, if it was a big idea it’d be the fact that the stuff really does sound like it should be ushering out over a crate paper covered hardwood floor full of post-teens in ‘83 and oozing out through a set of the best JBL speakers school money could rent. The thing is that ‘83 hain’t really the right year for the analogue of it all, and the melodies aren’t exactly older than ‘78. Now what makes this just nifty is that this year sure as hell ain’t 1983 nor is it 1978. It’s 2011 and maybe the question should be, What does prom-genre music really sound like? What does it sound like in 2011? Have there really been that many definitive proms that all it’s music can be threaded out into it’s own genre – and we’re not talking about what movies and TV have given us despite that being the best place to start. What came first, the prom or the David Cassidy? It’s weird. It’s bizarre. It’s attractive. It’s naive. In all honesty though who cares about that. Maybe you got swirlied a lot when you were in high school. Most people who end up “cool” or “successful” from an era like this were busy being mute and deciding whether the dungeon should be dark on level 4b and full of orcs in dungeon 1a. Thinking about prom can be painful, you know. What is really nice about debuting something like prom-genre is that nothing about Man The Hunter evokes pain. A song like “Take MyTrain” uncovers the potential of this “cool” idea. It is an idea that has toned up in the gym over the years, and comes back to the ten-year reunion in a tight black dress like a clarinetist with braces – what a delightful surprise.

At this point before you’re ready to drop your knickers in the backseat it behooves us to remind you that we never said that the idea behind “Take My Train” was big. We said it was cool. We technically said it seemed cool. Having a reason to enjoy something though is worth it’s weight in gold, despite it’s subjectivity.

There could have been Vaseline all over the lens at first blush, but we said ‘yes’ and we were really happy to be going to the dance. In person when Man The Hunter showed up at the door of reality and stepped into The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor what really happened was we got slapped with a $12 dollar door charge, $1 PBR and a pizza faced geek wearing black rimmed glasses with a really great personality. He managed to sneak two of his other friends into the dance too. He just fiddled around with his guitar while he maimed the song we had dreamed about. The toes of why he could have been “on to something” the whole evening were just stepped on, each time a familiar tune was jammed into a fake leather jacket sounding trio. Ah, the pain in our hearts was unbearable and the punch bowl looked like our only friend. Plus, the jerk’s Casio or toy piano or whatever synth it is that he uses to get us all hot with, the guy left it at home. Seemed to never occur to him that those bedroom groans and those quiet, introspective sense of humor having key strokes were capable of making people love him. It’s not his ability to write a song, it’s his lemon squeezing the juice of romance into a familiar motif! His jokes weren’t as funny as we hoped and instead of him forgetting us or him trying to make out under the stage with whatever girl’ll give it up, we totally forgot him and instead left The Blind Pig with a pipebomb shaped drama student from a high school in Brighton, MI.

*You can download a few of his tracks, for free!, at http://manthehunter.bandcamp.com*