Dum Dum Girls – Lost Boys and Girls Club
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Despite what you might have read, don’t panic. Dum Dum Girls‘ third full-length album finds Dee Dee and her band holding their garage-goth pop-core close — it’s just a lot shinier than it used to be. 2012’s End of Daze EP signaled exactly what it claimed, and with it we felt a shift in their recording process. Trading in lo for hi was deliberate, and Dee Dee Penny waded into cleaner waters both musically and in her personal life. Too True spotlights the transition as Dee Dee is now swimming in gloss, and it works for a number of reasons.
Dee Dee’s brooding-from-the-back-of-the-room vocals remain intact, except now she’s stepped into the light, allowing us to hear them more clearly than ever. Having written most of the tracks in a flurry of inspiration, she entered the studio only to exit shortly after due to exhausted vocal chords. Disappointed and discouraged, she used the waiting period as a chance to fine tune the songs and add a couple of new ones in the process. As we listen, we get a sense that the tracks have been meticulously picked over; every note she sings knows its place and absolutely glistens.
Besides her voice being as gorgeous as ever, Too True contains some of the most melodically beautiful tracks she’s written to date. They’re concise and pack a high concentration of pop intensity per second for their brevity. Nearly all of the repetitive chorus have earworm potential and give off 80s darkwave vibes. Her strumming pattern is faster than the majority of her earlier writing, sometimes leading the some of the tracks into slower paced jam territory. The entire album clocks in at just over thirty minutes, and the first track (“Cult of Love”) is its shortest but also its most exhilarating, illustrating the album’s strongest aspect. Rushing in to grab our attention for a few minutes and then running back out is a brilliant plan that leaves us feeling teased and hitting play again after just half an hour of smart, shimmery sucker punches.
Sure these songs are clean, but Dum Dum Girls are still as rock and roll as ever on Too True — and Dee Dee is clearly still one of the coolest girls at the party. I knew I loved this record at the sound of that in-your-face guitar riff at the chorus of “Cult of Love”. As I progressed further, the tracks continued to evoke reckless, romantically forboding Lost Boys images of foggy underpasses and dimly-lit ruins. To my delight, I arrived at track number seven: “Lost Boys and Girls Club”, and my fate was sealed. Once again I follow Dum Dum Girls into the night and savor every second.
