Philly’s Mannequin Pussy and Soul Glo team up for a ferocious show at Union Transfer, complete with a room-quaking communal scream
The double bill of indie bands who are on the Epitaph Records punk label will be back for two more shows on Wednesday and Thursday.
Mannequin Pussy week started off with a bang.
The Philly indie punk band fronted by Marisa “Missy” Dabice is finishing off a two-month spring tour with Philly hard core punk quartet Soul Glo with three hometown shows. The sold-out run started Sunday at Union Transfer and carries on Wednesday and Thursday.
“We don’t like to brag,” Dabice said, toward the end of the band’s by-turns blistering and shimmeringly sweet 75-minute set. “We’re humble people. But two bands from Philadelphia went on a tour across the country and sold out every f— show!”
The two bands, who are Epitaph Records labelmates, are particularly well-paired. Soul Glo, the West Philly trio of singer-screamer Pierce Jordan, guitarist GG Guerra, and drummer TJ Stevenson (plus touring bass player Winston Hightower) opened with 45 minutes of pure fury.
The quartet mixed hip-hop rhythm and Black Sabbath sludge into an unrelenting aural assault that switched on the mosh pit from the get-go. They pulled mainly from their acclaimed 2022 album, Diaspora Problems, with songs like “Coming Correct is Cheaper” and “Driponomics,” which reached back to the Reagan presidency to take a long view of socio-economic inequity.
Soul Glo has a flair for hard rock showmanship. Guerra tossed his guitar high in the air (and caught it, thank goodness), and Jordan swung his mic cord like a lariat, like The Who’s Roger Daltrey, before climbing off the stage and into the pit.
Their set ended with Mannequin Pussy’s Colins “Bear” Regisford joining the band for a high velocity “Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass),” and a prerecorded message arguing that liberation of historically oppressed groups in America won’t be achieved through electoral means.
Mannequin Pussy followed, with the charismatic Dabice — subject of “I Love Missy” shirts worn by many women in the crowd — joined by Regisford, guitarist Maxine Steen, drummer Kaleen Reading, and touring multi-instrumentalist Carolyn Haynes.
Focusing on their formidable new album, I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy also confronts their growing audience with raw physicality. But the brute force is leavened with melody in songs like “Sometimes” and “Control” (from the 2021 Perfect EP) that subtly seduce before Reading’s drums thunder in and shake you by the shoulder blades à la vintage Nirvana.
The band has sharpened its attack on the road. As ferocious as I Got Heaven’s “Loud Bark” came across as when MP played Free at Noon back in February, this time it was more effective. Dabice — who was dressed for the special occasion in a formal white gown with appliqué roses on the neckline — expressed her feminist prerogatives playfully.
She sashayed as she rhymed, “I want to be a danger, I want to be adored, I want to walk around at night while being ignored.” Then when she repeated the song’s title as a don’t-mess-with-me warning with ever-increasing intensity — “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite” — the room sang along with her.
Dabice stopped to address the audience at two junctures. Before I Got Heaven’s title track, she railed against organized religions “that try to control us by making us ashamed of the way that we are. But that is their shame, not yours.”
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Later, she used a traditional moment in a Mannequin Pussy show — a quiet break to give the audience room to breathe, followed by a collective screaming catharsis — to speak on the Israel-Hamas war.
Talking softly before slowly raising her voice, Dabice said, “We live in a country that has forced us to be non-consensually complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. And for what!” In a controlled voice, she added: “Do not get it twisted: We call for a free Palestine, but there’s no place in this movement for antisemitism.” When it came time to count down from three for that group scream, the walls shook.
For the band’s encore, Regisford came on stage in a crowd-pleasing Jalen Hurts jersey. Wile Dabice played bass, he took over on lead vocal for his “Pigs is Pigs,” a song about police brutality from Perfect.
He dedicated the song to “all the Black and brown people who are here” as well as his mother, who was in the audience, and all those protesting in support of Palestinians at college campuses. And when he asked how many in the 1,000-capacity room were at their first Mannequin Pussy show, well over half raised their hands.