Dreams do come true – just ask Lime Garden. Having, by their own admission, bombarded Dream Wife with gushing Instagram messages in their teens before moving to Brighton, where Dream Wife were formed, the band are now thrilled to find themselves supporting their heroes on tour, including Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff.
In recent years, the south coast city has also spawned Porridge Radio and Penelope Isles, and Lime Garden follow in those footsteps. Sitting somewhere between Warpaint, The Long Blondes and Black Honey, the quartet is savvy and stylish, and vocalist/guitarist Chloe Howard has a smile on her face even when singing a song called Sick & Tired.
It’s not perfect: Leila Deeley’s guitar is too low in the mix, the drums are too high, and – as with early Adwaith – there’s a sense that they’re still yet to settle on their own sound. But with more songs as strong as Clockwork and Pulp, which close out the set, Lime Garden could yet become the name on everyone’s lips.
Watching Dream Wife explode into action with Hey Heartbreaker and maintain an impossible momentum for more than an hour is simultaneously exhausting and invigorating. Energy crisis – what energy crisis? On the left, as we look: punk guitar whizz Alice Go, sporting a natty DW-branded neon-pink hi-vis gilet. To the right: all-action bassist Bella Podpadec, her foot regularly planted stadium-rock-style on the monitor, relishing performing in front of a crowd that includes her family. And centre stage, Rakel Mjöll, veering between spoken word and piercing shriek, inviting all the “bad bitches” up to the front and singing “I’m gonna fuck you up, gonna cut you up, gonna fuck you up” with an unnerving sweetness.
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Dream Wife’s second LP So When You Gonna… dropped in July 2020, so there’s an enormous sense of relief at finally having the opportunity to play the material live. Truth be told, though, the as-yet unrecorded songs written in the last few weeks leave a bigger impression. Take Hot, for instance, which appropriately enough turns up the heat another few notches early doors, namechecking Yeah Yeah Yeahs along the way (Fever To Tell is a constant touchstone), and finds Mjöll reciting her grandmother’s advice to avoid dating musicians. Or the ferocious Leech, on which she furiously demands “Just have some fucking empathy”.
Mjöll may declare that “gender is a construct”; deliver, with Somebody, the on-point slogan chorus “I am not my body / I am somebody” in denouncing objectification and sexual assault; and, on Temporary, address the extremely difficult subject of miscarriage – but this is no hectoring, sobering sociopolitical lecture. On the contrary, it’s a riotous, electrifying and potent mixture of punk, politics and pleasure – one that gleefully high-kicks the patriarchy in the face and that, at one point, sees Go (Player 1) and Podpadec (Player 2) barging and bashing into each other mid-song while Mjöll commentates from a safe distance.
“It’s fun to be in a rock band,” she grins. Correction: it’s fun to be in this rock band – as it most certainly is to be in their audience.
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Mon 28 Mar
words and photos BEN WOOLHEAD
