Take a band that has never been shy about expressing political opinion on the final day of a month-long tour and put them in a room less than two miles from the White House, and you have the ingredients for an explosive night of rock and roll. That’s exactly what Mannequin Pussy delivered on Thursday night at Washington, DC’s iconic 9:30 Club.
Eight numbers into a blistering 19-song, 75-minute set, vocalist Missy Dabice made her opinions very clear. In introducing “Pledge,” the noisy sludge metal track from 2016's Romantic, she admitted that they had taken the tune out of the set list for a while.
She felt the need to return it when she saw a video online of a kid asking why bands couldn’t leave the politics out of punk music. That’s enough to cause Dabice to go ballistic.
Mannequin Pussy in DC review
“I have never heard such stupid b******t in my life!” she screamed, before singing “I pledge allegiance to myself and nothing else – No matter what you do, they’re watching you and listening too.” Dabice and company were going to make sure that "they" wouldn’t have to work too hard to listen to what Mannequin Pussy is saying.
It may be the result of some trickster deity that Thursday’s show came the very day the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that advocates claim severely restricts the rights of the transgender community. Although she never directly mentioned this latest ruling, it may have added fuel to an already brightly burning fire.
Playing the second of two sold-out shows, and the final stop on this leg of their I Got Heaven tour, the quartet from Philly began with a couple of jolts from their past – “Everything,” also from Romantic, and “Cream,” from 2019’s Patience. That song opens “And I was standing at the gates of my hell,” and provided the first mosh pit of the night.
A few songs later, after the rebirth of “Pledge,” the band blasted through a sensational trio of tracks from the I Got Heaven, one of the best albums of 2024: the romantic “I Don’t Know You,” (dedicated to anyone with a crush on someone else), “Loud Bark,” (preceded by a brutal takedown of the way “traditional values” are being used today to restrict the rights of others), and the title track “I Got Heaven,” which contained one of 2024’s most incendiary lyrics, followed by one of its most prescient – “And what if I’m an angel and what if I’m a bore – And what if I was confident – Would you just hate me more?”
Then, after the freight train of “Perfect,” it came time for the best-known element of a Mannequin Pussy show. Dabice addressed herself to the boys in the crowd, exhorting them to do better at respecting themselves and others in equal measure before demanding that everyone in the room join in a primal scream.
The word we were to scream at the top of our lungs was part of the band’s name. And it wasn’t “mannequin.” The boys did a scream solo and then were joined by everyone else.
Then it was into the short jolts of electricity from I Got Heaven, “Clams” and “OK? OK! OK? OK!”
Musically, Mannequin Pussy has grown a lot in the ten years they have been putting out albums. While they could always deliver flat-out punk screamers, time, experience, and lineup changes have seen them morph into a very tight unit that can explore a range of styles without ever losing their manic energy. That’s one of the things that made I Got Heaven so potent.
On Thursday, their juggernaut of a rhythm section, powered by bassist Bear Regisford and drummer Kaleen Reading, never let the tempo drop. Reading may be the secret weapon, showing both technical chops and maximum power on “Of Her.”
Playing live, the quartet is joined by multi-instrumentalist Carolyn Haynes, and since primary guitarist Maxine Steen can also double on keys, it provides a lot of flexibility. They can go with a three-guitar attack as they do on “Softly,” or generate swirling atmospherics through the double keys of “Drunk II.”
And at the center of it all is Dabice. She commands the stage with a tense, thoughtful rage. I don’t even think she was in particularly good voice on Thursday. A month of screaming can do that to the vocal cords. During some of the softer moments, her voice virtually disappeared. But it didn’t matter in the least. The passion and power she displays on stage electrify every moment of the set.
Miami’s Deux Visages opened the proceedings. As vocalist Daphney Hanono pointed out, it was the first time the band had played a club outside of Miami on two consecutive nights. Their 30-minute set featured a pair of very strong songs – “Cut Bangs” and “Tethered.”
But Hanono’s voice, which can be very expressive but is not exceptionally powerful, was often buried in the mix and overwhelmed by Tony Jouvin’s bass.
That is a problem that Missy Dabice will never have. I had written in an initial review of I Got Heaven that there was something fortuitous in referencing “heaven” in this breakout album. Heaven, as any biblical scholar will tell you, is an evolutionary concept.
Jesus barely mentioned it during his preaching. It wasn’t until Paul began spreading the word several decades later that our modern conception of heaven began to emerge.
In the same way, I Got Heaven has proven to be evolutionary for the band. Only this time, it was the absence of Paul, co-founder Thanasi Paul, who left the band to set up that growth. I had declared that his absence allowed Dabice greater leeway in steering the ship.
Seeing them on Thursday makes me disavow that pithy conclusion. Dabice has always been the raging heart of Mannequin Pussy – and though she is now in her 30s and sometimes says that she feels old – she is only growing louder and stronger.