Hi L7, Welcome Back, Please Don't Ever Leave Us Again

The legendary all-female grunge band L7 is back, playing their first round of shows in 15 long years. They played two New York gigs this week, at Irving Plaza in Manhattan and Warsaw in Brooklyn. They sound fucking great. They look fucking great. It was so much fun. Never go anywhere again, L7.

Everything about last night’s show at Warsaw was fun and celebratory, even though it was furnace-temperature in the venue and far too packed to mosh. (And in more good news, a documentary about L7’s amazing career is due out soon.)

“This is like Bikram yoga,” cracked Suzi Gardner, one of the band’s guitarists.

“We didn’t even have Bikram yoga in the ‘90s,” bassist Jennifer Finch said, deadpan. “Or squirting! It was just called peeing then.”

Everything was fun and lighthearted at the Warsaw show, that is, except the small group of totally oblivious men who spent the concert jostling the women around them, blocking their sight, and occasionally stepping on them. A woman in front of me spent most of the encore with her elbows up, pointed outwards defensively, so a flailing blonde dude wouldn’t crush her. A beefy guy in a backwards hat and a Whiplash t-shirt made himself a host of silent and implacable new enemies after he shoved past a group of us probably 15 times in the course of the show, plodding between the dead-center of the crowd, the bar, and the men’s room, pushing everyone shamelessly out of his way as he went. (Shoutout to you, Whiplash dude! You must have a tiny bladder!)

You’d have to be pretty irony-proof to literally push women aside at the concert of an openly feminist band, during a song called “Everglade,” which is about an asshole man getting “rolled out the door” of a rock show after he punches and shoves women in the moshpit:

But hey, to each his asshole own, I guess. As L7 would put it, “People like you just fuel my fire.”

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