Dum Dum Girls –
I Will Be (Sub-Pop)
vs.
Blissed Out (ArtFag)

After a year or so of hoarding every single bit of Dum Dum Girls music/media the internet saw fity to throw into my reach, of recent I’ve found myself overwhelmed by a veritable polyphony of alternate Dum Dum Girls identities, as the band chase the dragon of major-indie label success and (here’s hopin’) iconic pop culture status.

Seeing the DDGs’ new live incarnation for the first time back in February, I was completely wowed. Minus the lo-fi/noise affectations, and plus the instrumental contributions and shiny new gear of the new members, this group is a different beast from the home-recordings I fell in love with a year ago, AND from the new Sub-Pop LP, fleshing out DeeDee’s preexistent material into masterpieces of exquisite, Mazzy Star-like, psychedelic pop.

There has been much cause to reflect recently on how easily blog-hyped home recording projects can crash and burn when they find themselves prematurely pushed into actual ‘band’ status, but that just makes the way Dum Dum Girls have transformed themselves into a world class live proposition all the more worthy of celebration. Like the Velvet Underground reborn as beautiful, impeccably attired ladies playing elegant minimalist rock n’ roll filtered through some opium-fiend reverie, it’s hard to imagine anything better actually existing in the whole world whilst watching Dum Dum Girls playing live through a good sound system, however carefully managed and aesthetically cross-referenced their stage persona and sound might be.

A certain amount of confusion seems to have been created though by the fact that this fully fleshed out DDG 2.0 has been touring in support of the I Will Be LP – a debut album that essentially still consists of DeeDee’s solo recordings recreated and/or remixed in a studio environment with the assistance long-standing doer of good in the music industry Richard Gottehrer. Several of the reviews I read have seemed to assume the full band is playing on the recordings, with one major league website in particular singling out Frankie Rose’s drumming for praise, despite the fact that the same vintage drum machine used on the earlier DDG material is prominently clattering away throughout. A sorry state of affairs indeed.

That said, DeeDee and Gottehrer should definitely be applauded for resisting the temptation to go the Big Production route on “I Will Be”, instead sticking relentlessly to the established palette of drum loops, lead vocals and a variety of guitar textures so heavily effected that they barely sound like guitars anymore. As noted, the general fidelity has been raised and the extremes of distortion and deterioration has been cleaned up, the reverb settings have been dialed down from maxed-out-Digitech-pedal to ‘80s-New-Wave-band. Squares may find the uniform sound, metronomic machine-thwaks and flat intonation get a bit samey across a 35 minute album, but for those of us with sufficient imagination what really shines here is the strength of DeeDee’s songwriting.

Now that we can hear the lyrics a bit better, old songs and new both reveal an unexpectedly compelling narrative aspect, transforming “I Will Be” from merely a collection of really cool pop songs into… well I hesitate to say it, but it’s sorta almost a concept album, or at least a record whose themes and images have been so carefully formulated that each track appears part of a greater whole.

From the narrator of “Jail La La”, who wakes up dazed at a strip club and winds up in jail yelling the chorus through the bars, to the rather more self-assured protagonist of “Yours Alone”, who’s known exactly what she wants out of life since the age of five, to the paranoid would-be starlet of “Line Her Eyes”, each song here seems to represent the first person statement of a different woman in a different phase of life. Factor in the brilliantly fierce 70s-era cover shot of DeeDee’s mum and the statement-of-intent title-track and “I Will Be” perhaps, kinda, sorta stands as something approaching a tribute to the struggles and achievements of 20th Century American femininity.

And, interestingly, it’s one that doesn’t seem to emerge from the overtly feminist perspective of [the good bits of] contemporary indie rock, but instead looks back with bittersweet glee at the kind of subject matter – starry-eyed teenage marriage, vicious fashion/fame-related rivalry, defining oneself as the adjunct to a male partner – that is (maybe, hopefully) less of an inevitable part of the female experience than it used to be back in the ‘50s-‘70s, the aesthetic golden age where Dum Dum Girls make their spiritual home.

So if you’re looking for a bit of honest-to-god content from your neo-girl group fuzz-pop, well look no further, but beyond all that blather I’m sure many listeners will be more concerned with the fact that just about every song on “I Will Be” is a hit in the established three chords / three verses mold, with a couple of great new rockers, and in particular, a handful of straight up love songs sweet enough to make you levitate through the skylight. “Rest Of Our Lives” in particular is incredible, with crashing percussion, swoon-inducing emotional heft and huge, swinging, r’n’b-influenced chorus-line coming together like the best bits of ‘60s and ‘00s chart pop crashing head-on and creating a song capable of reducing workplaces to dust as it blares over the AM radio in the staff-room. Or something.

I don’t like the version of “Baby Don’t Go” on here half as much as the old home-recorded one (and I never knew it was a Sonny Bono song either!), but aside from that, pretty stunning debut album right here, with a bit more depth to it than doubting parties may have expected.

And the same week I got my copy of “I Will Be”, a jiffy-bag hit the doormat containing my pre-ordered copy of Blissed Out, a cassette put out by ArtFag that conveniently compiles what I think is pretty much ALL the pre-Sub-Pop Dum Dum Girls tracks, minus the ones that were reworked for the album, and plus a handful of previously unheard cover versions and the like. Naturally sounding more wrecked, more aggressive, more mysterious and more eerily harmonious than the ‘official’ release, this, I suppose, is the real motherlode of why-we-cared-in-the-first-place, pulling DeeDee’s emerging pop classicism back under its original cloak of a more US Girls/Circuit Des Yeux affiliated take on emotionally-savvy tape-noise catharsis.

I’ve been listening to most of these songs various different formats for over a year now – from myspace to source-mp3 to poorly mastered vinyl to ripped-mp3 to tape and back to mp3 again – and their skuzzy aura of orchestrated chaos just seems to gotten even more captivating along the way, as the sound gets shakier and more compressed. “Put A Sock In It” and “Hey Sis” in particular seem to have benefited from process, sounding more than ever like some kind of neon-lit industrial presses of pop songs. The way the ultra-reverbed sounds seem to lose their original instrument-form entirely, imitating other things instead (VHS static, hissing gas pipes), the way these textures are threaded so carefully around the central luminous song-core – this continues to blow me away.

My favourite new find here is “Long Hair”, originally issued on a Hozac 7” I missed out on and one of the best ever DDG tracks, handily exemplifying everything that sets this original loner-bedroom-noise incarnation of the band from the more outgoing, expressive entity of the “I Will Be” era; forbidding and introspective of both sound and lyric, but as hypnotic and inevitable and unfuckable-with as the Ramones or Ronettes, as wasp-swarms of amp buzz circle about the multi-tracked, mantra-like chant; “long hair to cover my long face”, bringing back memories of that chick crawling from her well and through the TV screens in those ‘Ring’ movies.

The other big winner on the tape is the closing “Dream Away Life”, perhaps the most beautifully swoonsome true love ballad in DDGs’ increasingly formidable catalogue of swoonsome true love ballads – again, a song requiring no additional commentary to help make it’s impression on the world.

“Blissed Out”s weak link is the cover versions, which are impeccably chosen, natch, but in practice range from the basically acceptable (Black Tambourine’s “Throw Aggi Off The Bridge”) to the shoulda-stayed-private (an acutely mismanaged stab at Delta 5’s “Mind Yr Own Business”). These are strictly bonus track material, sounding more than anything like DeeDee working out her recording techniques before laying down the good stuff, but all grist to the mill of this tape’s fans/completists-only status I suppose.

So there’s a circa-2010 indie-rock Cinderella story for ya I guess – from bedroom sulk-noise to serious songwriting proposition to all-time-perfect-girl-band showstopper to be caught blitzing blurrily across badly mixed European festival stages in the mid-afternoon… take your pick, happy in the knowledge that every step along the way is proving a fine place to be.

Here’s some Mp3s:

Rest Of Our Lives (from “I Will Be”)
Long Hair (from “Blissed Out”)

And here’s a nice video for the single, in lieu of any live footage with decent sound:



Actually, this one's pretty good, although it looks like a dreadful corporate bruhaha they're playing:

Labels: album reviews, Dum Dum Girls