By Ben Bonadies
Photo by Wendy Schiller
Industry rule number four-thousand-and-eighty-one: you’ll never get anywhere with the word “pussy” in your band name. National papers won’t cover you. TV shows won’t feature your music. You’ll play to empty rooms across the country. Clearly, no one clued Mannequin Pussy into this rule. This Tuesday, they played their second show of a two-night, sold-out stand at The Sinclair on the heels of their blockbuster new album, the John Congleton-produced I Got Heaven.
Soul Glo, the Philly hardcore band, kicked off the night with a high-energy set. Frontman Pierce Jordan stalked the stage in socks and slides and screeched like that thing that kills Newman in Jurassic Park. A pit opened shortly after their first song.
If Soul Glo were all volume, Mannequin Pussy embraced dynamic ranges. I Got Heaven expanded the band’s palette to encompass a greater range of tones. Softer, dreamier songs like “Sometimes” end with singer Missy Dabice cooing quieter and quieter until her voice is barely more than breath. “I Don’t Know You” has that spectral, swaying Yo La Tengo feel aided by Maxine Steen’s bubbly synth arpeggios. Even at its harshest, as on harder-edged cuts “Of Her” and “Aching,” Dabice’s voice retains a sweet mellifluousness. She carries a sticky melody through the growling quasi-rapped sections of “I Got Heaven” and mid-set highlight “Loud Bark” fused the two modes in a way that’d make the Pixies proud: a quiet verse steadily rising to a crescendoing climax.
In the end, it was Dabice’s gentleness that stayed with me. She delivered all of her stage banter in a soft ASMR-style whisper as she paraded around the Sinclair’s stage in a flower-accented gown. The effect was spellbinding. Near the end of their set, Dabice gave a long speech about the power of music to induce catharsis amid a world of injustices, namely the ongoing Palestinian genocide and the religious dogmatism underpinning it. It should be noted that Soul Glo opened their set with a scream of “Free Palestine” and the Palestinian flag was draped over the back of MP’s keyboard.
“I know we are called Mannequin Pussy,” Dabice said as she brought her monologue to a close, hitting that plosive P extra hard, “but we actually take ourselves pretty seriously as artists.” On the contrary, I don’t think you give yourself a name that makes publicists and squeaky-clean social media platforms tremble unless you’re a serious artist.
Take a look at the rest of Wendy’s photos below. Scroll and be healed.
