Dream Wife – ‘Social Lubrication’ album review: punk’s snarling female voice
Punk rock has been undergoing a bit of a resurgence over the past few years. From the punk aesthetic growing more and more relevant by the day to people like Machine Gun Kelly adopting the sounds for his tunes, the sound of rebelling against authority has been just as much in fashion in the rock scene today as it did when people still put safety pins through their cheeks. Amid every other rock band on the scene, Dream Wife has brought one of the best elements of the genre back into the mainstream: riot grrl.
Across their third album Social Lubrication, the female-led rock trio have laid down some of the most savage rock and roll that any self-respecting punk rocker has laid down in the past few years, regardless of gender identification. Starting with the song ‘Kick in the Teeth’, the opening riff is disorienting on first listen before igniting like a firecracker as Rakel Mjoll spews her verbal venom across the track.
From a vocal standpoint, Mjoll’s delivery owes a lot to the golden age of riot grrl acts like Kathleen Hanna, having zero regards for staying in tune when it’s just as easy to get one’s point across when screaming bloody murder. The rest of the band happily obliges Mjoll’s demand for noise, with Alice Go’s guitar parts stampeding across the speakers and the basslines from Bella Podpadec absolutely rumbling underneath everything.
Indebted to the same militant punk bands of the past, a good chunk of this record has a lot on its mind about traditional gender roles. In the song ‘Leech’, Mjoll is seething at a certain subset of toxic men, looking only to see the superficial sides of one’s personality and sucking any ambition they might have dry. Though he may say all the right things at certain moments, it’s easy to picture the caricature they’re picturing, sitting in a three-piece suit and pretending to listen to everything this girl says, when in reality, his empathy ran dry the minute she sat down.
The cutting lines only continue on the title track, where Mjoll chastises the double standard set in mainstream music, where women are often looked at as inferior to their male counterparts strictly because of their gender. One of the highlights of the album culminates towards the end of the track, where Mjoll talks about all the things that this person tries to “fix” before ending it with a disheartened “fuck you”.
Granted, it’s not all doom and gloom for most on the lyrical front, either. Across other sections of the album, Mjoll is more in tune with her vulnerable emotions, not afraid to write a cheeky love song on ‘I Want You’ and reflecting on something as simple as dancing with a partner on ‘Mascara’. When she dips into her softer register, there are hints of Bjork in her delivery as she pours over every word coming out of her mouth.
Despite the abrasive sounds of half the album, production duties by Alan Moulder and Caesar Edmunds make each song wash over the speakers easily. Though there’s still punch when needed, some of the slower songs tend to sound like shoegaze, as if left over from a B-side session for a Slowdive record.
Though there’s a restless spirit in this album about relationships, it also doesn’t shy away from the toxic elements present in the band members. As evidenced by the song ‘Hot (Don’t Date a Musician)’, Mjoll is acutely aware of the hangups that come with someone in a creative occupation, knowing the pitfalls and the reliability that she cannot give to a partner.
For all of the riot grrl acts that have come before, this album possesses a certain amount of fun that’s sorely missing from the genre today. Even though more than a few songs have a signature bite to them, just as many are interested in leaving the political hangups at the door and writing songs about having a good time.
Despite the high points, not every song on the record is necessarily cut out to be a surefire hit. Whereas something like ‘Orbit’ might work wonders in a live setting, a song like ‘Honestly’ feels slightly more muted than some of the other tracks, almost teetering into the realm of too shallow considering all that came before it.
Though this is an album of many different faces, it never stops being engaging from back to front. Even with the great songs that have come from it, Dream Wife seem to be on the road to something much bigger in the future. There’s a band ready to explode hidden somewhere in here, but only time will tell when the potential goes from modest success to supernova.
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