I’m Not *Not* Having A Very Strange (Musical) Experience With Man Man & The Red Hot Chili Peppers On Pornhub Right Now

Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between is slated for release on May 1.

The album leak has emerged, in our time, as something that is increasingly one of the new dark arts of the music business. It is important not just how you do it, but when you do it, where you do it, and of course, the limiting exercise of what you do with it to make it, uh, sticky. Take beloved Philly expats Man Man, for instance, whose new LP,  Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, is slated for release on May 1. 

Earlier this week, the band staged a “leak” of the full album on YouTube. Their choice of limiting exercise? They took out all the vocal tracks and replaced them with the dulcet tones of Anthony Kiedis’ original vocal track for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ horrible classic, “Give It Away.” On every song. (A prank only bested, perhaps, by the scene in 24 Hour Party People where Happy Mondays deliver their new LP with no vocals at all, holding it ransom to their label, while the group departs to Kentucky Fried Chicken.)

You may be predicting how this goes: It was a full 6 hours, we are told, before attorneys representing RHCP (or “my pepps,” as they are known in this household) had the entire 46:21 minutes of Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between (Give It Away Version) completely scrubbed from YouTube. But nothing goes away from the Internet forever, and at present, this writer is taking in the affair on what is said to be the only place where it is still available: Pornhub. The search string to get here, given the band’s name, was not simple.

So what’s it like? It’s like this: A rollicking and super-lively piano rock kaleidoscope that has such great musical movement in its bones that one actually does not mind that the singer is, well, Anthony Kiedis, singing the same words on every song. You actually get the feeling that this could be a great companion piece to Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters. But of course, we can’t be sure until we get the genuine article. In the meantime, though, I must ask you,  my pepps, in case you are reading: Did, or did you not, tell us to give it away?