By Shawn Parow

Originally, this article was to be entitled “Big Balls & a Moustache Ride” in honor of this Thursday’s scheduled Test-Icicles/Man Man concert pairing at Mercury Lounge. Then the Test-Icicles made a hasty exit from the music scene, announcing that they were breaking up less than six months after the release of their debut album, scrapping all their U.S. dates in the process and freeing up precious alternative newspaper column space to tell the story of Philadelphia’s Man Man in full.

Since the era scientists refer to as “caveman time,” when laymen have come across “crazy new bands” with “totally bugged-out sounds,” they’ve often gone the easy route, classifying the music as “weird stuff” created by a bunch of “habitual drug users.” Man Man recently vaulted into this upper echelon. While we can’t vouch for their habitualness, it’s almost guaranteed that with regards to Man Man, drug users fall into one of two categories: They either dig the carnival ride that is a Man Man live show, or they think they’re in the midst of a horrible Alice in Wonderland adventure.

The group is led by the mustachioed anti-crooner Honus Honus, whose piano/synth/vocals combo has garnered a world-record 7,632 comparisons to Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. He is joined by a small army of men (clad in white shirts and white war paint and for the most part, also mustachioed) who ascend the stage and assemble around a claustrophobic setup of keyboards, horns, guitars and varied percussion instruments. With them all crammed into a deliberately small space, banging and singing away, they all perform absolutely essential functions as parts in a magical noise-making machine.

Sets at their recent shows have begun slowly with the air piano-inducing “Feathers” and the “fee-fi-fo-fums” of “Engrish Bwudd” (the opening songs from the just-released Six Demon Bag). Controlled chaos ensues. They storm along for the next 45 minutes, forgetting to stop and take a breath. In the process, it seems as if they’ve managed to ramble through each and every song from their still-developing catalog of jagged circus numbers.

When Ace Fu Records first released Man Man’s debut The Man In a Blue Turban With a Face just over a year ago, Honus introduced a universe replete with drunken sing-along-style lyrics that, at best, told of a broken man’s longings. The opening scream and organs of Turban’s “Against the Peruvian Monster” waste no time in establishing a general unease, as the growls of his desperately primitive voice form a fitting centerpiece for an album full of songs catchy despite (or because) of its horn blasts and percussive stops and starts.

This year brings Demon, a set of songs that, although less sloppy, still seem as if they’ve been yanked out of a sideshow tent. They piece together stories of heartbreak through layers of noisemakers and sing-screams.

Once again featuring Honus (along with an all-new lineup of Man Man men, with names like “Pow Pow” and “Les Mizzle”), the album has already garnered an inordinately large amount of press for its captivating weirdness.

In the world of buzz, this attention works out as a way to get the Coldplay fan-base to check out something without a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. Once they find themselves at a show, shouting out “moustache/moustache/moustache/6 moustache” (from “Push the Eagle’s Stomach”) in their own gravelly tone and exhibiting erratic body movements, they realize that they’ve become converts, and by default, part of Man Man’s growing chorus of unclassifiable tunes. Then again, maybe they just end up classifying them as some “crazy new band” and move on.

As if the band’s stage setup isn’t crammed enough, in addition to their Thursday Mercury Lounge appearance, they’ll also pile into Soundfix Records on Saturday night for an in-store performance. If the night ends with the store littered with debris from the explosion that is Man Man live, nobody can say they weren’t warned.

Thurs., March 2
Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (at Ave. A), 212-260-4700; 8 p.m., $12/$10 adv.

Sat., March 4
Soundfix Records, 110 Bedford Ave. (at N. 11th Ave.), 718-388-8090; 8 p.m., free.