The Groggy Squirrel

Man Bites God’s third album Peppermint Superfrog is a concise musical experience, taking just over half an hour to complete its thirteen songs and a not so hidden bonus track. Most tracks are around two minutes in length apart from the four minute epic that is Girlfriend. Save for a couple of ventures into different musical styles, we mostly get jangly pop songs with enough variation to keep things interesting.

The title track accounts for the CD’s Manga inspired artwork. In the early days, the song was introduced as a Japanese punk song with its nonsensical English lyrics. This seems to be a common feature of a songwriter writing in a language that is not their first. This may confuse some listeners without the preamble but it is adequately silly to provide some chuckles.

Listening to the remainder of the album, I noticed that many of the songs were long time fixtures of their live set. It was interesting to see how these tunes have been transformed by extra instrumentation and Pro Tools wizardry. The result are songs that are well fleshed out that are miles from their bare bones beginnings. Europop 3000 is especially well done, given the full cheesy electro pop treatment with a female voice providing translations for the nonsensical French phrases.

I noticed that there were two main techniques employed in providing the humour content. The first was to play it relatively straight lyrically throughout its duration, ending with a punchline that was usually unexpected (such as in Lubricated). This however makes the first casual listen of the CD seem as though these tunes were humourless and another listen was required to pick up on the song’s joke. The other is the reliance on escalating absurdity as the basis of the song (such as in Butterfly and Faker). The pitfall of this is that some of the lines are easily telegraphed, especially with their penchant for rhyming lyrics. Occasionally they combined the two techniques in the one song. Psychopath achieves this along with a short “musical freak out” in keeping with the unhinged quality of the tune.

It wouldn’t be a Man Bites God album without a homo-erotic ditty involving religious figures (Psalm) and a tune to have you thumbing through a dictionary (Pareidolia Now). We also get some clever wordplay in Autobiology with its plentiful cloning references. The boys find the time to explore some serious topics such as the stupidity of the modern world (Monkeys) and using sex as a bargaining tool (Head) but the latter is so blunt (and hopefully tongue in cheek) that it is susceptible to being taken as being simply crass and offensive.

Peppermint Superfrog is an entertaining album that is sure to please MBG’s fans and is a decent introduction to the band’s cheeky brand of humourous pop.

Peppermint Superfrog is distributed through MGM and is available online through Chaos.com , JB HiFi and Play4Me.
Man Bites God are currently wrapping up a national tour for the album. Check out our Gig Guide for the dates.
Visit MBG on the net at MBG