Man/Woman/Chainsaw are an impossible band to pin down. 6 members – drums, bass, keys, 2 guitars and a violin – allows the band to jump between genres at the tip of a hat. Also, having 3 vocalists lets them further experiment with sound.
Being on the cover of NME probably makes my little introduction a bit useless. You may already know they are releasing their debut album on August 7th. You might’ve heard they are shifting their style to something “Significantly more pop” as NME put it. You get that sense just by listening to their second single from Cannonball, “Nosedive”. It has a pretty conventional sound, but the violin over the top is my favourite part. The end of the song does spend a long time repeating the words “Baby get me back up over you” x28, where nothing much changes.
I much preferred the other single “Only Girl”. To me, it had more energy and cooler musical choices. I enjoyed the contrast between the dirty grunge guitar and the clean violin sound. The lyrical content is much simpler than the words for their previous songs, like my favourite from the band “Ode to Clio”. This is not a bad thing per se but I hope for more poetry like lyrics from the rest of the album.
The third single, “Goddamn Lizard Man” has a britpop kinda sound, reminding this mad prophet of Blur and Oasis, with a hint of old-fashioned American country. I do also enjoy this tracks vocal choices, a deep and almost pained quality to the vocals. However, I must add that Man/Woman/Chainsaw released a poster and a visualiser for this track that appears to be an AI generated image. The band say that the image was created by Drinkwater (lol) Studios and was animated by @ilovemotion_lee, saying “No AI was used”. My opinion is that the poster a real artwork, even if Mecha-Godzilla looks like its holding something weird. But, I also think the base image for the visualiser is an AI generated one based on the poster image, presumably to change the image from portrait to landscape so that it could be used in the visualiser. Because that visualiser stinks of AI.
The state of music reviews is very strange right now.
*JULY 6*
Man/Woman/Chainsaw released another one. “Get Up and Dance” is a good song, a cinematic song with that flair some of the other singles didn’t really showcase. It feels like Florence + the Machine meets Dune soundtrack in an incredible way.
