DREAM WIFE/ VIENNA DITTO/ SUZI WU, Heavy Pop & Dork,
Bully, 16/10/17
We’re a little confused.
We’re sure Suzi Wu says onstage that it’s her debut gig, but there’s
already stuff on the merch table, the promoters felt unable to announce her
presence beyond special guest, and she enters to a sprightly little bass and
drums riff like a conquering hero.
Perhaps the last of these is just stagecraft, as Suzi certainly squeezes
the maximum live impact from her bouncy dub pop. At her best, such as an intriguingly
asymmetrical Tom Waits cover, she sounds like Tricky channelling Gwen Stefani’s
sassy nous, but at other times we’re kicked queasily back to 1994, and a
well-meaning but ill-conceived crusty knees-up featuring Nicolette and Back To
The Planet.
Good advice to a new band is to play every gig like
you’re headlining Glastonbury, no matter how small. Even better advice to a band that has won its
spurs is to play every gig like you’re performing direct to your mates, to
avoid the pratfalls of pomposity and choreographed bombast. Vienna Ditto are so relaxed and unhurried
during this set, they only actually manage to play 4 songs, spending more time
laughing with the crowd, vainly poking at a drum machine trying to get it to
make the right noise, and looking like a Dickensian urchin and Chicago blues
singer had met each other in a time warp and decided to get stoned instead of
trying to work out how. All very
unprofessional, maybe, but the second of these 4 tracks is a glorious 10 minute
reading of old favourite “Long Way Down”, which is half enticing torch song and
half sonic abrasion, complete with rando-speed breakbeats and a guitar rubbed
against the stage barrier. The best
possible advice for an aspiring band? Be
Vienna Ditto.
If Vienna Ditto look mismatched onstage, two of Dream
Wife seem positively polar, the guitarist sporting an austere white bowl cut,
like Joan of Arc meets Mr C from The Shamen, and the vocalist stalking round
the stage in a tied off shirt looking like a 50s cheerleader gone horribly
wrong. Or, we should say, horribly
right, as Dream Wife is a band that marries feminist ire to well-honed tuneful
garage, and any soda fountain pin-up would be the better for sneering their way
through new wave anthems and hand-picking a coterie of moshing “bad bad
bitches”. If there’s one criticism to
make of this pleasing set, it’s the they never quite lived up to the promise of
their opener, where the vocals were all taut, Talking Heads supercilious
intonation, and the band pummelled poppily, like a whipped cream Ramones. There’s a new strategy, get the patriarchy to
dance themselves into submission.
