Whether turning a showcase set at South by Southwest into a massive game of bingo or using a discarded water bottle as a prop onstage at the Black Cat, The Blow‘s Khaela Maricich has always had a flair for the theatrical. So it surprised exactly no one when she veered even further into performance-art territory last year, tailoring her sets to fit into an overarching, conceptual narrative. Returning to the Black Cat last night for the first time in three years, Maricich opened her performance by explaining that she had been tapped to co-write songs with an unnamed celebrity, widely understood to be Lindsay Lohan. According to Maricich’s fictional account, the songs that she was about to perform were all culled from Lohan’s scrapped third LP.

What proceeded to unfold over the course of the next hour was by turns entertaining, challenging, bizarre, funny, confrontational and fun. Anything that takes aim at the very public exploits of Lohan is, of course, good for a few laughs — but in keeping with The Blow’s output, Marichich used this conceit as a vehicle by which to explore some fairly weighty topics: identity, sexuality, body-image, authenticity. There were costume changes (sort of), smoke machines, props, and choreographed dance moves. There were moments of awkward meta-commentary (“The discomfort is that certain people in the audience look at you like they can have you”), earnest self-reflection, and physical comedy (Marichich trying to balance in high heels). Most of all, though, there were songs: electro-pop gems from the well-loved Blow catalog, new songs that mimicked MTV celeb-pop fodder, and unguarded a cappella numbers that found Maricich even more alone at the mic than usual (for most of the songs, she simply sang over a backing track).