Dream Wife @ Liverpool Music Week, 1 Nov

Brighton-formed trio Dream Wife turn in an exuberant, incendiary performance at Liverpool's Arts Club

Live Review by Andy Von Pip | 07 Nov 2016

Sandwiched between a sell-out Halloween show at London's Moth Club and half a dozen scheduled appearances at Iceland Airwaves festival, if Dream Wife were trying to pace themselves you wouldn't have guessed it. Alice, Bella and Icelandic singer Rakel met at art school in Brighton, originally conceiving the band as a piece of performance art based on an imaginary girl band. The thing is, they were just so bloody good that fiction soon became reality. The debut album is being readied and their live shows have been attracting well-deserved rave reviews.

Tonight they don't disappoint; their boundless energy and obvious delight in what they do is infectious.  Alice Go, surely a guitar hero in the making, cuts a mesmerising figure as she plucks an array of glorious riffs from her guitar whilst bouncing around the stage like an elegantly-attired punk rock Tigger.

Then, of course, there are the songs, a perfect mix of infectious edgy melodic pop and grungy rock power. Lolita, Kids and Hey Heartbreaker all feature on their superb debut EP, and the live version of latest single FUU is a thing of infinite wonder which highlights singer Rakel Mjöll's ability to switch from sugar-coated pop perfection to raging nettle sting roar in a heartbeat.

A word too for support act the wonderful Pink Kink, a Liverpool-based collective who hail from Germany, America , Spain , Norway and Sunderland, who have been a breath of fresh air on the local scene. Their performance is so uplifting, so euphoric that they would blow lesser bands away. You could throw any number of genres at Pink Kink and yet any attempt to pigeonhole them would ultimately fail. They certainly aren't a band who would allow their creativity to be restrained by something as daft as glib journalistic genre-tagging . All in all, a wonderful night's entertainment from two fantastic bands who, if the stars align, have the talent and ability to make 2017 very much their own. On this showing they certainly deserve it.