THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 1.

Yeah, I decided to make it forty-two. And your point is..?

Here’s the two bonuses, before we move on to the usual five-per-post run down.

42. Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams (Sub-Pop)

Sneakily checking this out prior to release a couple of months back, I scribbled some stuff here that still sums up my feelings quite nicely really.

‘Only In Dreams’ is such a leap from DDGs previous material, it’s like listening to a different band. Amazing to think that as recently as the end of last year, she/they were still knocking out tracks in the same lo-fi vein as her earliest material (cf: the ‘He Gets Me High’ EP, ‘Stiff Little Fingers’ 7”, the Misfits cover on the b-side of the ‘Bhang Bhang..’ single). ‘Only In Dreams’ though is full steam ahead toward bombastic, mainstream-focused guitar-pop that really sounds like The Pretenders.

Inevitably, this takes them a lot further away from the elements that initially drew me to the band, but as far as second album progressions go it’s a logical and well-executed move I s’pose. The chief failing here isn’t so much the sound as the fact that – for me at least - the songwriting doesn’t match up to the high standards set by the first LP, favouring generic love songs and empty platitudes over the weirder/darker details and character studies that stood out on ‘I Will Be’. But the drumming’s still great, the guitars still have a reassuring coating of fuzz n’ phase all over them, and when it all works, it’s pretty brilliant - you’d certainly be hard-pressed to find better gigantic, transcendent, radio-ready pop/rock songs than ‘Bedroom Eyes’ and ‘Just a Creep’ in the racks circa 2011.

Far from a total bust then, but basically listening to ‘Only In Dreams’ feels a bit like seeing a much-loved pupil graduating from art college and getting a job in the city or something. Bye bye Dum Dum Girls, hope you have fun out in the big wide world! I’ll stay here playing that f-ed up tape with ‘Long Hair’ and ‘Hey Sis’ on it.

Youtube > Bedroom Eyes




41. Hype Williams – One Nation (Hippos in Tanks)

Writing previously about impeccably mysterioso London duo Hype Williams, after catching them live last year and subsequently reviewing their first 12”, I ended up comparing them to Boards of Canada. A fairly random shot at a passing insight, but one that now makes me feel kinda vindicated, as ‘One Nation’ sees them jettisoning the final traces of the cut n’ paste murk and sketchy bedroom improvisations that characterised their earliest material (check out the ‘High Beams’ EP if you can find it, it’s great), and defaulting to a fully synth-based approach that… well, that basically sounds *so much* like Boards of Canada that the similarity becomes unavoidable. Or at least, I think it does. I suppose it could just be some weird fixation I’ve developed?

Anyway, Hype Williams’ main departure point from the BoC blueprint – aside from generally working with a slightly more threatening, lo-fi aesthetic – is the removal of any head-noddy 4/4 ‘beatz’ (always the element that narked me on BoC’s otherwise very fine records), and their replacement with the kind of menacingly fragmented dub-step type drum programming that I won’t embarrass myself by trying to define, as I’m basically pretty unfamiliar with the styles from which it originates. Further contemporary signifiers can easily be heard in another significant addition – that of direct vocal samples - heavily echoed sighs and exultations, warped reflections of contemporary club music and radio pop.

In keeping with their previous releases, ‘One Nation’ takes the form of an entirely unmarked white label 12”, anonymous but for the fact that Boomkat put it in the post to me when I ordered the Hype Williams record. I had to dig up an illegal download to find any track titles (where did they come from? Did some random uploader make them up?), and just had to google again to find out what label it’s on. Feeding into this aesthetic of overall eeriness, HW, like BoC before them, succeed in creating an atmosphere of Utter Creep by means of dragging ostensibly ‘positive’ sounds – crackly poetry recitals and pitch-shifted self-help dialogues, echoing watch alarms and distant ice cream van chimes (no laughing/crying children this time round, but I think I caught a few on the last record) – out of their original contexts, letting them float anxiously in the void, twisted out of shape alongside the duo’s soothing, distantly familiar melodies, made strange via deteriorating washes of electronic sound. Y’know, just like…. uh, so look, I don’t wanna sound like I’m hitting HW w/ plagiarism allegations here – it’s really good to hear this stuff revisited, retooled - made more visceral and unpredictable for a new era, and, as ever, ‘One Nation’ is an engaging and rewarding listen that takes on a life beyond its obvious antecedents.

Soundcloud > Warlord

Labels: best of 2011, Dum Dum Girls, Hype Williams

4.
Dum Dum Girls – Bedroom Eyes

On 08/09/11 I said:

“Currently having a listen to the new Dum Dum Girls record.

Compleeeetely different sound & recording technique from anything she/they’ve done in the past… even her voice sounds really different. Very ’90s BIG SOUND going on, but not necessarily in a bad way.

It sounds like a more pop-orientated Throwing Muses in places, maybe even a touch of Fleetwood Mac-gone-punk or something…? Those can’t possibly be bad things, right..!?

Second albums have proved disastrous for a lot of new-ish bands this year, so here’s hoping this one stays the course.”

grant observed that this tune sounded like he’d always hoped The Pretenders would sound, and I thought OF COURSE, *that’s* where I’ve heard that particular tone of voice that DeeDee is doing throughout this album before!

On further listens, the record’s a curate’s egg deal really: some bits (like this tune) are thrilling, big budget guitar pop that manages to hit you just right and fool you into feelin’ something. Other times, textures and song lengths get totally out of control, but without an ounce of the kind of writing or emotional chops needed to wrangle such bombast (“the Oasis effect”, as we in the trade like to call it), making the second side in particular into a vapid, pummelling sprawl. That I don’t like it as much as the early one-woman stuff is a no-brainer, but still, what can ya say – people gotta move on, and it’s a more valid progression than many manage.

Labels: Dum Dum Girls, song reviews, the difficult second album

THE FORTY BEST RECORDS OF 2010: Part Eight

Really sorry for the unacceptable delay to this final instalment, which comes even later than last year’s much delayed final instalment. Some unanticipated work deadlines are to blame. Think back to 2010 everybody, and let’s go…


5. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Rush To Relax (Goner)

Unlikely winners of some kind of Australian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize for their previous album, Eddy Current are another band who can easily seem like a music writer’s worst nightmare. Four no nonsense fellas who play drums and bass and guitar and sing, making undeniably compelling and imaginative rock music, the strengths of which are sufficiently self-evident to require no further explanation. It’s exciting music, but it’s hard to communicate as much on paper. It’s really great, but I mean, god knows what the world’s few remaining legitimate music journos will do with themselves if this sort of thing catches on.

Just like 2008’s “Primary Colours”, “Rush To Relax” has proved a steady grower over the past nine months, a real staple of my trudges to and from work and round-town jaunts, regardless of season or mood. See, I’m already making it sound dull. And it’s scarcely gonna get less so when I give in to my urge to describe Eddy Current as a “real solid band”, but basically, that’s what they are, in the best possible way. The rhythm section sound amazing here, and do sterling work throughout, not being silly or drawing attention to themselves but anchoring the flow of the music perfectly, just the way they should. As on previous recordings, guitarist Eddy Current has a great, abrasive, treble-heavy tone and is always up to something interesting.

Whilst remaining broadly within the parameters of punk rock, the surprises ECSR throw our way are simple, bold and extremely effective ones – stretching one song out to seven minutes, compressing another one into fifty seconds. Dropping the bass and drums out of the mix for a verse to keep us on our toes, or ending the album with twenty minutes of the sound of waves crashing against some antipodean shore (er, somewhat less of that on the vinyl version, obviously). In a way, it reminds me of something like Alternative TV’s “The Image Has Cracked” – an attempt to move things forward and provoke new response from listeners, without alienating anybody or compromising the basic appeal of the music.

At the centre of all this, vocalist Brendan Suppression, whose contributions to previous outings sometimes seemed a tad obtuse or overly repetitive, really comes into his own as a distinctive frontman, riffing on some surprisingly personal themes in characteristically funny, straight up fashion. Although his grating, Ozzie-punk delivery is about as different as can be imagined, Brendan’s performances on this album actually reminds me a lot of Jonathan Richman on the first Modern Lovers record, spinning earnest yarns about his feelings and his exploits against the band’s rolling backing. Unlike Jonathan’s heart string-tugging teenage dementia though, Brendan seems like a classically easy-going, agreeable sorta bloke, and listening to these songs, it’s easy to imagine him strolling around his home town, mulling over the problems life throws his way, doing his best to be do good by everyone and generally live a balanced, grown up existence. Quite a refreshing stance for a guy coming from a genre whose lyrical concerns typically revolve around the hyperbolic expression of anger, misery, excess and abuse.

Given his voice and physical performance style, it would be all too easy for Mr. Suppression to lean on Rollins-style aggression as his default position, so it is nice that he has the balls to take the opposite route. It’s really sweet to hear him outline his chivalrous approach to relationship politics on “Gentleman”, and to candidly admit his failings in such on “I Can Be a Jerk”, whilst his more conventionally punk confessions of social awkwardness on “Anxiety” and the perfect under-a-minute blast of “I Walked Into a Wall” ring very true. He begins “Burn” in more of an aggro frame of mind, attacking some unspecified person for their craven untrustworthiness, only to turn things around at the halfway point, apologising to the subject for his lack of awareness of their apparent mental problems, and wishing them the best for a full recovery in the future! An astonishingly disarming gesture, and perhaps an all-time first in the long history of generic punk rock dissing songs. It is a testament to his talents as a great singer/lyricist/frontman/whatever that he manages to pull off such a self-conscious and musically unnecessary move so well, and perhaps a testament to his standing as a decent guy that he felt the need to change the song to make things clear.

I realise this probably isn’t the most thrilling review I’ve ever written, but regardless: it’s really great to have band like Eddy Current in the world right now. They don’t make one false move here, and I enjoy listening to their records a lot.

Mp3> Tuning Out


4. Overnight Lows – City of Rotten Eyes (Goner)

From November 2010:

Overnight Lows are a three-piece band out of Jackson, Mississippi, rocking that ever-popular husband/wife/drummer configuration. Their album “City of Rotten Eyes” came out on Goner Records earlier this year, and it totally destroys.

That’s about all you need to know really, and this music makes me feel like being BRUTALLY CONCISE (some hope), but it’s the least I can do to at least try to use words to sell you on a record I’ve listened to all the way through about, say, five days out of every seven for the past couple of months.

Comparable in both form and execution to the spirit of that first Thermals album, crossbred with an accidental nod or three to the “world’s fastest strumming average” ideal of Reis & Froburg’s Hot Snakes, Overnight Lows play punk rock stripped of all fat, devoid of bullshit – twelve loud, memorable, breakneck-paced songs about being angry and hating stuff. Five of them make the two minute mark. Not a clunker in the bunch, and not a slow bit or room to catch a breath either. Best walking to work music ever.
Drummer Paul Artiques plays about as is humanly possible without lapsing into hardcore/metal double kick drum territory – hi-hat going like a metronome and heavy on the ride cymbal. He is a great drummer! Marsh and Daphne Nabors correspondingly lay into things with a crazed ferocity, rather akin to the spirit of a guy on super-charged two-stroke motorbike, randomly hurling dynamite and trying to overtake a train. Recording quality is pretty good, but with everything in the room mixed WAY UP, rough edges in the playing swallowed by the feedback… and by the next verse, which has probably finished before you’ve even clocked what the hell is going on.

Like most great punk rock, each song here begins as a monomaniacal tirade about some aspect of singer’s life that s/he feels is simply intolerable and, well, just sort of continues as one really. “You’re well read / big words stuck in your tiny head / you’re well read / can’t understand what you said”, shrieks Marsh Nabors at some scholarly antagonist in ‘So Well Read’. Wait dude, what's so bad about reading books? Nothing, obviously, but if you read books and you're a JERK, well - fair game. “When I kiss your lips / all I taste is lies / I know what I’ve gotta do, and that’s sad”, responds Daphne in ‘Static Scars’. After a few dozen listens, both singers’ lyrics stand out as genuinely excellent – direct, imaginative and dryly funny, however random and unprovoked the fury with which they’re spat out may seem.

It’s funny, I could spend all day listening to contemporary albums by bands of musclebound guys effortlessly playing ‘punk rock’ music of similar volume and velocity to this, but none of it would hit me like the Overnight Lows record. What we’ve got here I think is he sound of people who WEREN’T born to play music like this, straining themselves to the nth degree to keep up the pace and take the damage, sounding like they could fall apart any second – which is fantastic, and exhilarating, and yeah – punk rock.

Mp3> So Well Read


3. Personal & The Pizzas – Raw Pie (tape on Burger / LP on Bachelor)

Thousands of groups at any given point in post-’76 time may claim to take inspiration from The Ramones, or else just flat-out imitate The Ramones, but how many can honestly say they succeed in capturing what The Ramones were about? I mean, beyond the basic template of playing fast, loud, short songs called “I Don’t Wanna do such-and-such” or “Somebody is a something”, how many bands have there been who are really able to replicate the uniquely strange feeling of that holy first album, with its weird, thudding, midtempo rhythms, its instinctive melodic bass lines and its sullen, special ed kid black humour? The sound of The Ramones before they became “The Ramones”, if you will.

I’m not saying Personal & The Pizzas are the only ones to achieve this by any means, and I guess this band have an advantage over most of their peers in that their New Jersey pedigree allows Mr. Personal (as we sadly must call him, I suppose) to mimic the distinctive cadences of Joey’s singing to an uncanny degree. But still, I am continuously amazed at how much love and attention to detail and genuine feeling P & The Ps put into their Ramonery, and how often their song-writing instincts lead them beyond simple imitation, and straight back to the source.

Ok, so I realise they’ve got a stupid, in-jokey name, and probably make their (extremely small amount of) money playing dubious scenester beer busts full of coked up, destructive duh-brains and whatever, and I know that Mr. Personal’s cringeworthy, sub-Fun Lovin’ Criminals inter-song banter is utterly beyond the pail, especially on a *recorded album* (at one point he wishes someone “a big ol’ muchos gracias”). But seriously guys – I think these songs really stand up.

Just listen to the tough, deadpan pathos of the acoustic & tambourine-based “I Ain’t Taking You Out”, the way it shifts key for its heart-rending middle section (“I took you out yesterday / and all you did was cry-ay”), or the way that hit single “Brass Knuckles” follows in the footsteps of “Loudmouth” and “Beat On the Brat”, turning the threat of violence from something alarming and sinister into a kind of hilariously unlikely affirmation of purpose (“..gonna pop you in the mouth”). “Don’t You Go in the Ground” too is a sublime piece of minimal songcraft, its poignant chant of “retard, retard, such a little retard” rising triumphantly to the declaration of the title. I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, but the warm, welcoming feeling that emanates from the song mitigates any suggestion of malicious intent. It reminds me of hearing The Ramones for the first time, on a slightly degraded ‘best of..’ tape a friend lent me, not being able to fathom what in the hell Joey was going on about most of the time (‘Cretin Hop’? ‘Pinhead’? WTF?), but loving it anyway on some kind of instinctive, pre-verbal level.

There’s more to life than The Ramones though – there’s The Stooges too! And, as per the record’s title and cover, Personal & The Pizzas pay extensive nudge-wink homage to the James Williamson-era band here on exultant cuts like “$7.99 for Love” and self-penned theme tune “Pizza Army”, to the extent that I’m surprised Mr. Osterberg’s presumably eagle-eyed legal people haven’t been on the phone to get this shit shut down. Still, this is clearly all to the good. When in Stooge-mode, The Pizzas rock like bastards, and whilst I know you’ve gotta love Iggy sometimes, I think I’d far rather listen to these genuine carefree loons welding hunks of “Shake Appeal” and “Pretty Face..” to proclamations that their love is “..cheaper than a pencil case” than sit through whatever cash-harvesting ventures everybody’s favourite car insurance salesman / self-proclaimed great-grandfather of whatever currently has in the works.

So in conclusion: ‘originality’ be damned, there’s enough good times and good feeling and good tunes and rock n’ roll blather crammed into the extended tape version of “Raw Pie” to last a decade, and if there’s a buncha pointless crap alongside it too, well, that’s just the way they roll I guess. Along with Mean Jeans, I vote Personal & The Pizzas as the most genuinely worthwhile band to emerge from the whole late ‘00s Nobunny/party-punk wave. If you find their whole shtick a bit off-putting, well, I can’t say I blame you, but seriously – if, like me, you’re dumb enough to still have Joey and DeeDee and Iggy and Ron on the brain in the second decade of the 21st century, give this lot a shot, and I hope you won’t be disappointed.

Mp3> I Ain’t Taking You Out


2. Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be (Hozac/Sub-Pop)

When I first got this album, I was worried that maybe its appeal would kinda prove fleeting, that with a shiny sound and everything on the surface I’d kinda lose interest, despite all the attention I’d lavished on the earlier DDGs material.

But no – it’s really stuck with me. Nearly a year down the line, I think these songs are excellent, and sound amazing. I think this is a great album.

Back in May, I said some stuff about it:

“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.”

Mp3> Rest of Our Lives


1. Betty & The Werewolves – Teatime Favourites (Damaged Goods)

Well, here we go.

In all honesty, it took me about a split second to decide what my favourite record of 2010 was. Betty & The Werewolves, obviously!

It’s great to have an unquestioned favourite band (favourite contemporary band, at least) based predominantly in the same city as me, so that I can go and see them, like, twenty times. When I first saw them, supporting Holly Golightly at the 100 Club over three years ago (!!), I was all, like, wow – Betty & The Werewolves! They’re amazing! That band is just too perfect to exist! But exist they did, and when I saw them return to the 100 Club just last month, my enthusiasm had not waned in the slightest. During the interim, “Euston Station” and “David Cassidy” proved two of the best singles issued in recent years, and both of them can needless to say be found of this exceptional, instant classic, long-player from Damaged Goods.

Time and time again I’ve read venerable music journos going completely overboard in their praise for bands and local scenes to which they have some tenuous connection, so let it be said that whilst it was a massive honour to be able to appear on the same bill as them several times this year, I would love the Bettys just as much even if they were to punch me in the face and tell me never to darken the door of one of their performances again.

What more can I say that I haven’t said before? Doug is the best drummer in the world, and Emily and Laura and Helen’s distinctive styles of shouting and singing and guitaring and bassing are equally peerless. The band’s collision of hardcore punk and indie-pop remains more fun than life itself, and if one or two of the slower numbers don’t quite float my boat so much when they start to lose the former half of the equation, well at the same time you’d be hard-pressed not to recognise “Should I Go To Glasgow?” as one of the most perfectly executed Shop Assistants/Tallulah Gosh-style numbers of recent years, or that at least twelve of the album’s fourteen tracks are total killers.

Really it’s a bit like having their live set pressed on a record so I can listen to it whenever I like, and it’s great to be able to finally make out the words to songs like “Purple Eyes” and “Heathcliff” and "Francis", and, er, yeah… I’m about to grind to a halt here, so just do the decent thing and buy it already. Have a happy 2011 everybody! It’s Friday night and I’m gonna go… stop.. writing stuff. For now.

Mp3>Purple Eyes

Labels: best of 2010, Betty And The Werewolves, Dum Dum Girls, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Overnight Lows, Personal and the Pizzas

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

THE FIFTY BEST RECORDS OF 2009: Part #8

(Well so much for the Jan 4th deadline - sorry folks!)

15. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post-Pavilion (Domino)

Well, you knew it was coming at some point, right? Sigh away. Funny, I remember listening to ‘Merriweather’ for the first time almost exactly a year ago, and not being overly impressed. I guess the thing was, every previous Animal Collective album hit like a wonderful slap in the face, a completely unexpected handbrake turn that took the band to the – ahem - ‘next level’ via a path nobody could have anticipated, from the naïve stumble-folk of ‘Sung Tongs’ to the bizarro world psychedelic rock of ‘Feels’ to the sickly, ultra-condensed pop smash-up of ‘Strawberry Jam’. ‘Merriweather’ by contrast offered no sudden surprises – it sounded more than anything like Animal Collective’s first ever collection of generic, Animal Collective-type music, and as such it was a bit disappointing. I was also annoyed that everyone on the interweb seemed to be immediately hailing it as thee greatest triumph since ever, and writing stuff like “after the disjointed mess of ‘Strawberry Jam’…” – hang about, I thought last year you were saying ‘Strawberry Jam’ was thee greatest triumph since yadda yadda? – I still think that album’s great, and I smell a rat. Anyway, having got all that out of my system, I preceded to give ‘Merriweather..’ a bit more time, listening to it blaring on headphones in the winter air rather than at polite volume on my computer speakers, and yes, all those interweb voices were right = it’s pretty bloody fantastic. One of my defining memories of 2009 was walking in circles around the gleaming, hyperreal departure lounge at Heathrow airport at 8am, listening to ‘In The Flowers’ and ‘My Girls’ and ‘Summertime Clothes’ over and over again, and then getting off the plane in Venice a few hours later, and doing the same. I highly recommend making a brief, drunken visit to a beautiful European city halfway through January by the way – it’s a fantastic and slightly surreal way to fight back against the onset of several months of uninterrupted real-fucking-world horror that the new year inevitably brings, and I wish I was doing it again this year. But, er, anyway, yeah – Animal Collective. Boy, they really pulled their finger out songwriting-wise on this one, huh? In addition to the aforementioned future sounds-of-the-‘00s staples, which you probably don’t need to be told about again, ‘Bluish’ and ‘Guy’s Eyes’ are two of the most world-collapsingly beautiful, unconventional love songs I’ve heard this year – a perfect sublimation of everything Animal Collective do at their best, using new techniques and technology to create a whole new kind of psychedelia, so overpoweringly blissful it (temporarily at least) knocks all my coveted guitar FX mangling sludge outta the water. Really something else. On the down-side, this album (like this paragraph) is unavoidably cursed by being TOO LONG. At the risk of sounding like a big-dumb-head philistine, most of the songs here go on a for a good minute or two longer than they need to, and personally I coulda done without ‘Brothersport’ and ‘Lion In A Coma’ entirely – both of them I find kinda irritating (a frequent AC pitfall), and they seem to push the group uncomfortably close to faux-world music jammin’ hippie self-parody, which is bad for them and bad for us. So despite containing and soundtracking some of the awesomest moments of the year, ready to knock our children’s socks off when they rediscover the Greatest Hits, I’m afraid it’s number 15 for you boyo.

Mp3> Bluish


14. Nothing People – Late Night (S-S)

Appropriately enough perhaps, I know nothing about Nothing People – who they are, where they come from, what they’re about – and I’ve never even thought to do a web search on ‘em until now, looking for a scan of the artwork. But I do know the sound of this LP has won me over, leading to many, many, many repeat spins that have served to give a whole new, more enjoyable atmosphere to things as I doss about my room after work or prepare to go to bed. Nothing People are very much a psychedelic rock band, but one that exists outside of any of the musical conventions or clichés such a label would seem to imply, drawing more from the rustbelt other-ness of Midwestern home recorders like Jim Shepard and Mike Rep, and the sinister, druggy bedtime rock that used to exist around the less comfortable peripheries of what ended up being stamped forever as ‘shoegaze’ in the early ‘90s. Nothing People’s songs move slow and simple, like a motorik juggernaut reduced to ‘stalking speed’, and they convey an appreciation of soothing, subterranean rock repetition that few since Spacemen 3 have been able to put into action. These songs seem to seethe their way into existence like the hiss from a leaking gas main, earthed upon grinding, phoneline fuzz and punched into the foreground by crisp, heavy tremolo and repeat echo, left swaying in the gaping void between beats. Somewhere, someone is filming a scene for a Gregg Araki rip-off movie in which two emaciated, greasy-haired teens feed each other tabs of acid and crawl all over each other in a gauze-heavy, regally furnished slacker pad bedroom…. and it will go on and on, and this album is the soundtrack. The scene will have no particular point or artistic merit, but it will be AWESOME, and critics will be leaving the screening preparing to slate it, but still secretly groovin’ on that never-ending guitar hook from ‘It’s Not Your Speakers’ and wishing they were in it.

Mp3> It's Not Your Speakers


13. Dum Dum Girls –12” EP (Captured Tracks)

It may have been a hipster-bait 7”s worth of material needlessly bumped up to 12” to clean up on the collector’s market, and still sounding like a shit pressing, but my copy of the Dum Dum Girls EP will still be one I’ll be waving around in years to come, pathetically proclaiming “I was there!” when the subject of this era’s music comes up. Guess I took the bait. If anything, the four songs herein have grown to sound even BETTER than they did when Dum Dum Girls first entered my consciousness circa March ’09. ‘Catholicked’ and ‘Yours Alone’ are strong enough songs to withstand any whirligigs of hype and backlash and hypelash and pick up bands and record deals and world tours, and god, how I love the roar of those over-saturated garageband guitars when you turn them up loud enough to hurt. But it’s ‘Hey Sis’ that really cements DeeDee Dum Dum Girl as a truly inspired assembler of sound, single-handedly rehabilitating the drum machine as an aide to chaos, and those great, interlocking sheets of pure distortion, and that brilliant shift in melody on the chorus – as perfect a marriage of pop and noise as I’ve ever heard. I’m looking forward to the album and seeing Dum Dum Girls (now with genuine plural) play live this year more than is probably healthy, but whatever happens next, I think I could happily keep on listening to this EP forever. For the moment though, back to searching Hype Machine for a rip of that brilliant cover of ‘Play With Fire’ she put up on Myspace…

Mp3> Hey Sis




12. Gris Gris – Live at the Creamery (Birdman)

Things seem to work strangely in the world of Greg Ashley. This album, recorded in California in 2008, was supposed to commemorate the last ever show from his band The Gris Gris, although it seems they’ve quietly been back in action in ‘09, even if new material or a new Ashley solo record is apparently not forthcoming. Anyway, looking at the line-up for this one – just Greg on vocals and guitar backed up by organ, bass and drums – I figured it might be a rather sedate affair. Those familiar with Gris Gris’ killer rep as a fearsome live act will have known better of course, and verily, this live album is an absolute monster. On stage it turns out, Gris Gris are a flailing beast full of derelict, unwholesome chaos, sounding rather like that perfect Syd-era Pink Floyd bootleg that you’ve always dreamt about hearing, only with all the Brit-psyche tweeness thrown out in favour of a brooding, baroque death-rock ambience more becoming to the deep south feel of the band’s name and background. On their studio albums, things are rather more mannered - in a cool, multi-layered epic psych kinda way - but here we get to listen to the four piece band doing their best to recreate this studio sprawl on the fly, with restraint taking a backseat, as already pretty unnerving, funeral marches of songs like “Skin Mass Cat” and “Big Engine Nazi Kid Daydream” spin themselves out into startling passages of unhinged improv, with shrieking feedback and lunatic shred-guitar crescendos crashing to their doom amid dissonant, stabbing organ notes, while the bassist starts blurting on a clarinet and the drummer pounds out the marching step of an invading army. Holy Shit. Then Ashley is back at the mic, declaiming in ‘Satanic preacher’ mode through some kind of phoneline distortion, his voice sounding rougher and more accusatory than ever; “save your kids / cut their wrists / before they die inside machines”. Set the controls for the heart of the swamp, anyone?

Mp3> Ecks Em Eye


11. Mika Miko – We Be XUXA (Post Present Medium)

MIKA MIKO ARE FUCKING RAD – that’s the truth of the matter, and what future custodians of truth will have to say on the subject of what constitutes ‘rad’. Or rather, “Mika Miko were fucking rad”, for unfortunately it seems they’ve disbanded in the past few months, which is a drag and a half. I’m glad that I finally got to see them play earlier in ’09 though, when they were still very much concerned with being fucking rad in the present tense and turned in perhaps the most exhilarating and fucking raddest set I saw all year. I sorta wish I could’ve seen ‘em with a more comfortable audience of small town punks rather than obnoxious urban trendies, so I could’ve done some jumping up and down, but then if that was my concern I shouldn’t bloody live in London should I? Anyway, ‘We Be XUXA’ is their second full length, and for my money the best thing they’ve ever done. You can probably guess my two word summation already, so let’s get a bit more detailed. ‘XUXA’ sees MM moving away from the post-punk skeleton of their previous work, restricting the syncopated dancefloor stuff to a couple of choice cuts and instead moving into the arena of fantastic, full bore punk rock, taking their early LA hardcore template (think Plugz, Dils, Urinals etc) and stripping it of all the bilious masculinity and grunt, instead aiming at the feet and trying to get the party started, with supremely righteous results – music for striding down the street, feeling like you’re full of energy and on your way to do something really cool. Unfortunately, Mika Miko’s love of ‘80s punk seems to have extended to giving ‘XUXA’ a really muddy, undifferentiated mix that may have harmed the album’s chances in some people’s end-of-year polls, but man, forget that – we’ve got mp3 players and things now precisely so we can turn a record like this up loud and appreciate the many, many things that are to be loved within it. Michelle Suarez’ no-bullshit guitar is a joy throughout, the rhythms are fierce, and Jenna Thornhill and Jennifer Clavins’ vocal tag team in rare form, with loads of great, funny lyrics being thrown back and forth – plus the cemetery photo shoot artwork looks absolutely beautiful on my vinyl copy, probably one my fave covers of the year, and oh, the giant fold-out insert is a joy too! I even enjoyed the totally gratuitous ‘Turkey Sandwich’ remix that closes the album. I seem to recall most reviewers singled out ‘Turkey Sandwich’ as being entirely concerned with turkey sandwiches, but in retrospect the song seems to signal the band’s demise about as clearly as it possibly could; “Jenna I’ll miss you when you go / but don’t think that I don’t know / we’re going in different directions” – such a sentiment could easily get lost in the music’s contagious enthusiasm, but nonetheless: sadface.

Mp3> Blues Not Speed

Labels: Animal Collective, best of 2009, Dum Dum Girls, Greg Ashley, Gris Gris, Mika Miko, Nothing People

I Like Dum Dum Girls.

I like Dum Dum Girls. You might not. Taking part in the same tightrope walk between mysterioso rock n’ roll sublimity and arch, self-satisfied tedium as The Vivian Girls (who get a standing ovation for their services to the former) and Crystal Stilts (who plummet to their boring deaths whilst demonstrating the latter), I think Dum Dum Girls are going to be busy splitting audience reaction down the middle for years to come.

Currently blessed with a sense of mystery (both musical and biographical) that will likely fade once the expected hype kicks in in earnest, Dum Dum Girls would seem to be the work of one Ramones / 60s pop obsessed girl called DeeDee, recording alone in…. well, the natural cliché would be to say “in her bedroom”, only I muck about recording stuff in MY bedroom, and I’m not very good at it and don’t have much in the way of equipment or know-how, but I don’t think I could get recording quality this bad if I actively tried. So instead let’s say: Dum Dum Girls sounds like the work of one Ramones / 60s pop obsessed girl recording alone on an abandoned cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic and broadcasting the results via WWII radio equipment to a farmer in the Shetland Isles who picks it up on short-wave and dubs it onto old C90s.

Ok, it’s not quite *that bad* - the vocals on some of the tracks are pretty bright and pristine, as are some of the sugary fuzz guitar tones, whilst the Spector-on-a-budget reverb-soaked roar of the overall sound is often beautifully realised. But the instruments, in general, are a muffled, indistinguishable mess – amplifiers turned to the wall with a cheap mic on the other side of the room, whilst the weedy electronic drums are a vague presence at best, often thudding off into a different dimension entirely never to return at around the time the first chorus kicks in.

Showcasing a brand of lo-fi that’s the polar opposite of Times New Viking’s painfully distorted practice room skree, the Dum Dum Girls take on rock n’ roll is distant, incorporeal and about 50% *quieter* than most modern recordings, making these songs seem almost ghostly, like the fading half-life of what used to be a furious punk-pop rave ups.

This seems appropriate, as Space-Rock, you see, appears to be DeeDee’s other big thing. And, unlike most of the big budget neo-‘gazers, she’s smart enough to realise that the perfection of that particular craft lies not in the pedals or the careful wooosh of overdubbed noises, but in the judicious application of Mark E. Smith’s three Rs. Combined with her sinister, minimal pop sensibility, this love of lingering, detached, slow-burn repetition comes together on songs like “Put a Sock In It” to create a previously undreamed of gateway between Shadow Morton and Spacemen 3 via ‘Beat On The Brat’.

It’s the sound though that’s initially going to see a lot of listeners turning back from said gateway with an understandable cry of “fuck this boring, can’t-be-arsed demo tape shit!” But for anyone willing to loiter around for a few minutes and let this music sink in, the whole no-fi thing is also a very effective technique, encouraging a deeper listening that lets a near heartstopping sense of classical pop beauty creep out of these hazy, introverted, simplistic songs, even more surely than it did on the 3rd/4th/5th listen to the Vivian Girls album.

Listening to the myspace was my first exposure. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first; I thought the songs sounded kick-ass, and I loved the fuzz guitar and siren-song-on-the-shortwave vocals a lot, but the wrecked sound and general sense of lethargy bothered me. Nonetheless, I simultaneously felt very, very happy and a reassured to be living in a world in which the heartfelt yet uncertain DIY outings of this lonesome Ramones/60s pop/space-rock girl could be met from all sides with praise, plaudits, encouragement and excitement, rather than with scorn and dismissal. Pat yourselves on the back, 7”-trading American lo-fi scenester types, you done good!

So in spirit I was THERE, but on a musical level, I wasn’t sure I could really hang with it. Then “Baby Don’t Go” rolled around, and…. I was sold. Utterly.

Listened to the other songs again, headspace properly adjusted, and…. beautiful. I could weep.

Maybe you’ll disagree. I mean, I can’t hide the fact – I just LIKE this sort of thing. Old fashioned girl group style songs, fuzzy, droning guitars, fast punk tempos, bursts of one note noise, slow blissed out ballads, music made by girls, music that’s weird and out-of-time and lonesome, music that remembers The Ramones and their teachings. That’s me.

If I was into 80s goth, meandering, grumpy songs, thin guitars, monotone Jim Morrison whining and music made by faux-druggy boys, I’d probably be all over Crystal Stilts instead.

I guess interpretation of this kind of distant, overtly referential music is largely a matter of aesthetic preference. Maybe these bands are just leaving us a hollowed shell of noise and second hand gesture that we can fill with whatever meaning we see fit. Maybe I just project a sense of emotional honesty and feminine pop/noise catharsis onto Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls because I want to, because it makes me feel better. Sometimes I might close my eyes and pretend there’s a dragon in the room. You might laugh, but the dragon’s still really cool.

I think it’s good when rock n’ roll calls for us to flex our imaginations a little and make-believe. I like Dum Dum Girls. Do you?

Mp3s:

Yours Alone

Baby Don't Go

Not a great deal of Dum Dum Girls vinyl or plastic available at present. Myspace is here.

You can order her four song 12" for $12.99 plus shipping from there, or else fire up the ol' Hype Machine and wait for some more widely distributed records.

Labels: Dum Dum Girls, I like, pop, punk