DREAM WIFE – RESIDENT, BRIGHTON 13.6.23
It’s always lovely to see Brighton bands who’ve gotten big return to our sunny shores. Later this summer, we’ll see Royal Blood wiggle their way back down here for a day festival on the beach, and today, the ever-loyal fans of punk trio Dream Wife were treated to an intimate show at the record store Resident. The art school friends turned DIY punk deities are on their third album now, but there’s no sign of fatigue in the album tracks they shared with us tonight.
Perhaps the only tolerable thing about living in a supposedly post-feminist world in which harassment and misogyny are still rampant is that it gives plenty of writing inspiration for bands who want to call this discrimination out.
Dream Wife have never been shy about their strongly-held feminist beliefs, but this album’s a bold step even for them: here, the band turn their weapons to the music industry itself. Their album title ‘Social Lubrication’ is delightfully suggestive, almost deliberately designed to upset delicate sensibilities, and the title track that opens their Resident set is just as shame-free.
Frontwoman Rakel bops about the aisles with a sharp staccato voice, delivering equally sharp lyrical allusions to sexual harassment and casual mockery of women in music, as if to hammer home that even “low-level” sexism is still part of a longer verse, and a larger picture, of misogyny. As the band told Billboard, “we’re not going to be polite anymore for the sake of being polite”.
In my humble (read: stroppy) opinion, it’s a little bit lazy to compare any femme-focused rock band to Riot Grrrl, but Dream Wife really are a band who know their grrrl history.
They altered the lyrics to ‘Hot’ to reference Le Tigre, and later tracks like ‘Who Do You Wanna Be?’ really did embody that classic Riot Grrrl style of spoken word lyrics and spiky, twangy guitar riffs courtesy of the ever-fierce Alice Go.
What’s really true to feminist rock tradition, though, is that Dream Wife shows are always genuinely empowering. At their bigger live shows, their performances of ‘Somebody’ summon mosh pits of young women screaming their autonomy together, gathering around Rakel’s microphone like it’s the centrepiece of some folk ritual.
There were so many young girls at Resident tonight, several with their parents; shoutout to any parent who’s down to take their child to a small, safe live music event, introducing them to a band who are confident in everything they do. As well as grinning at each other during their tracks, the band members consistently danced about with their audience, smiling widely as they shared their music with a new audience and brought them into the fold.
Dream Wife setlist:
‘Social Lubrication’
‘Hot’
‘Honestly’
‘Orbit’
‘I Want You’
‘Who Do You Wanna Be?’
‘Leech’
