No one can say MUNA hasn’t been busy. Since the pandemic concert moratorium broke a little less than two years ago, the band has played the Boston area no fewer than six times, both as openers (for new indie standard-bearer Phoebe Bridgers and country refugee Kacey Musgraves) and as a headliner for their own two-night stand back in September, and again just last week at Wellesley College. It’s the sort of pace that can burn out not just the act but its fanbase, overservicing it to the point of diminishing returns.
Neither was a problem Saturday at Roadrunner, where the show was, in the words of one ticket checker, “very sold out” and singer Katie Gavin, guitarist Josette Maskin, and keyboardist/guitarist Naomi McPherson — the core three who make up MUNA — spent an hour and a half fairly vibrating (and in Maskin’s case, undulating) with glee and power. It didn’t even matter that the band only had one new song in its repertoire since its last major pass through town. MUNA played the setlist as if it were for the first time.
The 1980s-style sustained power chords, juddering synth bass, and drum shudders of the urgent “What I Want” made for a powerful opener, blooming in a chorus of wild yearning. Those ‘80s sonics drove much of the material, like the sharp guitars pounding through the light keyboard throb of “Runner’s High” and the itchy, jittery drums, popping bass, and electronic handclaps of “Pink Light.” For much of the concert, MUNA was a sharper, queer-savvy HAIM.
But a handful of songs revealed a pronounced country influence. With Gavin on acoustic guitar, “Kind of Girl” was an updated “Fly”-era Dixie Chicks anthem, McPherson’s guitar plinked like a ghost mandolin on “Taken,” and “Anything But Me” could have been a Shania Twain song if they’d only crammed an exclamation point into the title.
When the latter song began, Gavin was so tickled by the pair of inflatable horses brought onstage by the crew that she forgot that the microphone wasn’t in her hands when she started singing. But the crowd had her back, singing her own words back to her until she could stop laughing and get back to her mic. It offered a tangible illustration of the sanctuary and uplift at the heart of so many MUNA songs like the shuddering, propulsive “I Know A Place.” So did “Silk Chiffon,” an utterly delirious song of physical intimacy that wrapped up the band, and the audience, in a swirl of giddy emotion as MUNA sent everyone out energized into the cool night.
Like Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s “Unholy” run through an industrial grinder, openers Nova Twins offered a bouncing, distorted groan that sounded like bubblegum haunted-house music.
MUNA
With Nova Twins. At Roadrunner, Saturday
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.comor on Twitter @spacecitymarc.