There’s a touch of every John Congleton producee in Mannequin Pussy’s latest album: Bully’s snarling bubble-grunge shout-sing; Ezra Furman’s gender-cognisant rock and roll anthems; Tegan and Sara’s masterful pop song construction. Enlisting Congleton for their first full-length in five years, the Philadelphia punk band has never sounded so red-hot and dynamic, their wake-the-fuck-up songwriting given a maximalist colour palette.
Far from one-note, I Got Heaven manages multiple moods and energy levels. “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch,” vocalist Marisa Dabice barks on the riotous opener, though a few songs later she’s come to a plaintive realisation that there are crucial gaps in her knowledge of a prospective bedmate. “I know a lot of things / But I don’t know you,” she coos as brushed drums and pretty percolating keys nestle underneath her.
This careful balancing of sweet confessionals and fired-up antagonism – “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite” is another scream-from-the-rafters mantra – are what makes I Got Heaven so well-rounded; the band could simultaneously intimidate history’s meanest musical iconoclasts but are also in conversation with the Wolf Alice-on-Radio-1 kind of ‘punk.’
There are several examples of both, and of the bridge between them, but the best shot at pleasing everyone might be ‘Tell Me Softly,’ for which a blanket of fuzz-distortion is draped over the guitars and Dabice’s vocals. In the compelling bridge build, she asks, “What if one day I don’t love you anymore?,” part self-doubt, part reprimand.
Indeed, sentiments like these culminate in a record acutely focused on impermanence, and suggest why the band plays it as it lays – barking, biting, hurting, howling, and making space for those soft-spoken sweet nothings as well. As if trying to erase her every previous doubt – and yet simultaneously cement this thesis – Dabice spends the climax of the album’s closer repeating the plea/confirmation/warning that “Nothing’s gonna change”. Mannequin Pussy may not know if they’re coming or going. But whatever happens we’ll be following.
