Soul Glo isn’t really my thing, but I’m not gonna tell you they didn’t burn the place down. Mannequin Pussy, not so much.
Frontwoman Marisa Dabice isn’t an especially clever lyricist, and it’s easy enough to get past when listening to the band’s records, whose sonics are more about feeling than thinking. But while the records are mercifully absent overt speechifying, this show sadly was not, and Mannequin Pussy’s emotion-to-intellect ratio is a poor fit for onstage polemics, as is Dabice’s drama-club-president stage persona. The affirmation-hungry crowd ate up the platitudes—War and genocide and bigotry are bad! You’re beautiful just the way you are!—but somewhere in the back half of their set, about 10 minutes into a tediously sotto voce pep talk informing us that a Mannequin Pussy show is a vessel for our collective catharsis, I had had enough. Thankfully I got out of there before the group scream therapy started.