Man/Miracle

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Man/Miracle – “Hot Sprawl”

Website / MySpace

It’s tempting to call MAN/MIRACLE a band, but they’re more than just guys with instruments: they’re four guys with musical instruments. Speaking precisely, they’re really more of a group of musicians who write and perform music together– a “band,” if you will. In this configuration, they create the sort of intricate, resplendent, wooly guitar pop to which many adjectives– including totally inapplicable ones, like “wooly”– might be applied.

The nucleus of the thing emerged from the inconsequential burg of Los Osos, CA, where singer/guitarist Dylan “Swimp” Travis and drummer Tyler Corelitz grew up. “We’ve been playing music since high school,” quoth Swimp. “There’s no music scene in Los Osos, but we played anyway.” After a long mystical sojourn during which both men found their spirit animals, the pair reconvened in Santa Cruz and teamed up with lead guitarist Ian Benedetti and bassist Brian Kennedy to form the lively beat collective we know today.

Soon, they had captivated a local following due to their naively ambitious performance schedule. “We didn’t know how to be in a band, really, so we were just playing as many shows as possible,” relates Swimp; I didn’t have the heart to tell him, but it turns out that’s basically what being in a band is.

But then, tragedy struck: Swimp broke his back, and the band was on hiatus for months because he had to wear this thing around his thorax that looked like a big plastic urinal. It was during his long, Vicodin-leaned recovery that Swimp and the boys recorded their first EP, which came out all spacey due to the pills. Swimp eventually pulled through, and his triumph over adversity is exactly the kind of heartwarming story you’d want to read about in a press kit.

Seeking a shittier living situation, the boys then left the pastoral splendor of Santa Cruz behind and moved to Oakland, where Ian and Swimp rented the sort of squalid shanty you also love to read about in press kits: “It was basically this terrible, cockroach-infested hellhole that was falling apart, but it had a basement and we could play down there… it was moldy and we were sick all the time,” Swimp reminisces, coughing a mist of tuberculous blood into his handkerchief.

Though the roaches eventually won and forced the boys out, the situation formed the aesthetic fundament that undergirds their new effort, The Shape of Things. “I think a lot of the album is about that experience– the cover is a picture of the Ryugyong Hotel, which is this building in North Korea that’s falling apart but has been under construction since 1987. It’s about living in this space that’s both crumbling and full of life.”

And that’s The Shape of Things — a hoarder’s hovel with treasure under the trash. A daydream of a better place, with photogenic guitar vistas. Grody messes of genius congealing in the sink. A little bit of hollering once in a while.

“Man/Miracle’s debut record, The Shape of Things, is a bottled whoop of joy. Its ten songs form one giddy wave of yelping vocals, skittering Afro-pop guitars, clattering drums, clapping hands, and group hollering. You know that moment in Stop Making Sense where David Byrne and Tina Weymouth start doing this goofy, high-stepping dance in tandem, grinning happily across the stage at each at how unguarded, how caught up in the moment, they feel? Every song on The Shape of Things feels just like that. It’s a distillation of the sheer joy of motion. Or, to put it in somewhat less dignified terms: few things I’ve heard recently have made me want to go ‘Wheeeeee!’ like The Shape of Things.” (eMusic Selects)

“It seems the only person who dances at shows anymore is the blazed guy up front. The thing about Bay Area-based Man/Miracle’s new song from their first full-length album, The Shape of Things, though, is that it makes me want to shelve my Puritan ways, join said guy, and flail my hands around. We first heard from these guys in 2008, when we Forkcasted a sing-along track from a 7″ called ‘Pushing and Shoving’; building on that sound, ‘Hot Sprawl’ grooves like Akron/Family on its ebbs, but come high tide, it’s (pleasantly) hollering madness. ‘Fun’ will always follow these guys around. And it doesn’t really matter that you can’t understand a word frontman Dylan Travis is saying– the guy’s got a mean set of pipes, and in the surges here, it’s sweet balmy DeVotchKa with an occasional Wilderness vibe.” (Pitchfork)