Punk-Indie-Pop: Mannequin Pussy: It shoots

Pop melodies and noise, the best of both worlds. The new album “I Got Heaven” by the American punk-indie-pop band Mannequin Pussy combines what punk rock can do to you (sound pressure) and do to you (jumping up and down and throwing your arms in the air). ), with a euphoric melodiousness. In short: “I Got Heaven” shoots like a dream. For example, the title song, you can’t really do anything better: guitarist Marisa “Missy” Dabice screams at you urgently for one verse, in the second verse her voice goes down and then climbs back up towards the chorus. It’s heavy with “Ooooh ooooh” choruses and keyboard fanfares. In the last thirty seconds the two come together in a finale that should trigger a respectful battle in any medium-sized hall.

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From then on, Mannequin Pussy’s fourth album keeps changing registers. What connects all the songs, regardless of whether they are in a quieter mood (“Loud Bark”, “Split Me Open” or “I Don’t Know”), want to be summer hit indie pop (“Nothing Like”) or veer towards hardcore (“OK ? OK! OK? OK!”, “Aching” or “Of Her”): They are determined by an urgency that emerges through Marisa Dabice’s voice, which alternates between crystal clear and shouting. The continuous vocal energy that spills over to the listener here can otherwise be found in the early material of Kathleen Hanna or in Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, the two singers from Sleater-Kinney, and in very few other places.

What Mannequin Pussy has in common with the last three mentioned is a radical openness in the lyrics, in the description of emotional states of emergency, which has nothing in common but rather wants to move forward together with the music. So to where things get better, knowing that you have to take the shit that torments you with you if you want to get rid of it. In the hit “Drunk II”, which can be heard on the 2019 album “Patience”, Dabice sang about the alcoholic time after a breakup, simply and clearly: “I was so fucked up, I forgot we were broken up”. The whole thing is a farewell song that can work wonders for anyone trying to move on from someone. Not by singing about a triumph, but by going into the shitty feeling and basically destroying it from the inside out.

This requires the suggestion of maximum openness and sometimes exceeding the boundaries of good taste. In the song “I Got Heaven,” the lyrical self assumes desperation (“I’m stuck inside my loneliness / I’m stuck inside my grief”) and then asks itself and the person being sung a few questions: “And what if I’m an angel? / Oh, what if I’m a bore? / Would you just hate me more?” Catharsis is at best an auxiliary expression; if it clicks, you’ll potentially feel miles better after this song, even if you’re not feeling bad at all. The album “I Got Heaven” focuses on an intense euphoria that arises when someone leaves an “endless march to nothingness” towards self-discovery and rediscovery.

Mannequin Pussy: »I Got Heaven« (Epitaph Europe/Indigo)