Dum Dum Girls
Too True
Sub Pop Records – January 28th 2014
By Brooke Segarra (@blaremag)
Find it at: iTunes | Insound | Official Store
7.0
There are bands that, when they release a new album, you wait with bated breath and you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready for the next great insight into my life” (i.e. Sunn O))), Radiohead). The Dum Dum Girls have never been that band and we’ve loved them for it. They’ve been the staple of total femme garage jangles that are about wearing your heart on your sleeve, him wearing his heart on his sleeve, her heart on her sleeve and so on. Too True is not quite that, but it does feel like Dee Dee Penny and the girls have been implying a change of pace since 2012’s End of Daze EP which sounded like the musings of a girl who took scissors to the school jumper she still had hanging in her closet.
The first two tracks on Too True, “Cult of Love” and “Evil Blooms”, submerse us in the dark imagery that carries throughout the album. Take a respite from getting all caught up and emotionally distraught in the “I got a guy, I lost a guy” pandemonium of dating and the realization you have sounds an awful lot like, “Why be good?/ Be beautiful and sad/ It’s all you’ve ever had”. Note, even though Dum Dum Girls isolate this mood well, the proto-goth pop and lyrical hooks on Too True are nothing modish. We’ve just never heard anything quite like this from Dee Dee and unsurprisingly, she does it well. Yes, there are a lot of cliches as phrases like “Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?” sound like something we’ve all heard somewhere, sometime before but not with her confident, venereal lilt.
Listen: “Trouble Is My Name”, “Too True To Be Good”, “Rimbaud Eyes” || Watch: “Lost Boys And Girls Club”