Sarah Knows Nothing About Music- Dream Wife, by Dream Wife

For a while now I’ve wanted to try out this idea: writing reviews about music that I know as little as possible about. And helpfully, I have a pretty horrific knowledge of so damn much of it. My style of music listening has always taken the form of: find a song or artist I like, and hard rotate it until said song or artist is engrained onto my actual soul. It’s why people are often pretty impressed with my memory for lyrics, though they don’t know the awful truth: I only know those songs I’m singing along to. My modern music awareness is particularly dire: if it ain’t K-Pop (and even there it’s mainly BTS) or those 3 songs by Billie Eilish that I know, you can expect a completely blank face from me when you hum the tune. When I look at the music review section of The Guardian, my reactions are normally either ‘absolutely minus idea who that is’, ‘oh, that’s a person, not a group?’ or ‘they aren’t dead?’. Seriously, it’s not good.

I’ve always been super impressed by people with a lot of knowledge about the music scene. It seems so much damn bigger than other art forms: films may be longer than songs, but you don’t need to watch a whole album of them, and damn it’s quicker to look at a painting or sculpture. How do people know about different acts, genres, and trends? While I really do not know (hats off if you’re one of those people), I thought I would start trying to actively improve myself on this front. I would say it’s a New Year, New Me thing, but I’ve delayed it until February. Anyway. My plan is to ask people, potentially anyone, to give me an album recommendation, and I’ll listen and write my thoughts down here. And I want any album recommendations. Anything you like. Think is mindblowing. Or just important to have heard. I don’t care if it’s old or new, what genre it is, where it’s from. The only criterion I need is that I haven’t heard the album before, and trust me, that’s a bloody wide net. You’ll be amazed (and possibly disgusted) at what I don’t know.

So, to start, I told one of my friends about this idea, and she promptly recommended approximately 7,659 albums for me to try. Can’t fault her enthusiasm. So I thought it would be easiest to start at the top of her very, very long list, with Dream Wife, by Dream Wife. Let’s get it:

Before the album

She knows me well, I’ve never heard of this act before. At all. Nada. Nowt. From the picture of them on Spotify, it looks like a band with three women in it. Exciting, I do mainly prefer female acts (yes yes I know my favourites are BTS and Queen, but APART FROM THAT OK), so this should be good.

Very first thoughts

Oooooh it’s a punky girl band. VERY good choice friend. One of the very first words I write down is simply ‘yaas’. Spotify is showing that the album is from 2018, but I’m getting strong riot grrl vibes (how many ‘r’s in ‘grrl’?) from them. The first song has a double hand clap section, always a winner. The first four songs (Let’s Make Out, Somebody, Fire, Hey Heartbreaker) are really fun, the middle ones lose me a bit.

As the album goes on

I assumed fairly quickly that this group was American, though on googling them afterwards found out they’re from Brighton. Local gals! I guess the term ‘make out’ tricked me. Though apparently the lead singer is Icelandic and lived in the US for a while. More and more with each song I get a strong hit of mid noughties indie guitar nostalgia, and I think it’s the guitars. They sound like…something. Something I know. This assessment is probably why I’m not a music journalist.

There are some epic lyrics in these songs. I have always enjoyed anything with a punk edge (as little as I know about the genre), and it’s a style of music that does fun, playful and exciting lyrics better than most. In Somebody, the refrain ‘I am not my body/I am somebody’ sounds tailor-made for a slut walk or women’s march. Taste’s ‘I’ve got the worst taste/I’ve got the best taste’ is an amazingly accurate description of my own preferences in like, everything. And lines like ‘Do I amuse ya/Do I confuse you?’ in Act My Age and ‘I spy with my little eye/bad bad bad bad bitches’ in F.U.U are the kind of wonderfully direct chants that I wish we had more of from female pop stars. Apparently, this band is great live, and if I get to shout along to lines like that, I can see why.

When the album finishes

Ohhh that was good, well done recommending friend. Ending on the hyped-up, angry bop of F.U.U gives the album a great send-off, and again makes me think this band must be good live if they structure their album to pop so well in the opening and at the finale (do albums have finales? They do now). I always need more women who don’t give a shit in my life, and this is a genuinely fun, straightforward album from three of them.

Where would you hear this album?

Either in a party scene montage on Skins (if it had been around then, and God it sounds like stuff that was) or in the opening credits to a Gen-Z version of a Mean Girls type film. Or in any place that has anything to do with zines. This all feels very ‘ziney’.

Would it go on a playlist?

I would definitely put at least half of this onto some kind of platform where I could hear it a lot yes. I think Let’s Make Out, Act My Age and F.U.U could be particularly useful after a long day of teaching confused, often apathetic, Korean teenagers.

D’ya like it?

Really, really, yes.