Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford |
Dum Dum Girls sound like the kind of band Karen O would have joined had she never formed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: an all-girl group playing melodic pop with a grimy punk aesthetic. I Will Be is appropriately lo-fi – there’s ample guitar fuzz, echoing vocals, and drums that sound like they’re being hit by a hyperactive four-year-old, but the album is also rife with hooks. It should be – it was produced by Richard Gottehrer, co-writer of 1960s confections ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ and ‘I Want Candy.’
I Will Be is short, clocking in at under half an hour, with an average song length of two and a half minutes. This doesn’t give Dum Dum Girls much room to deviate from the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, to the detriment of songs like ‘Yours Alone’ and ‘Lines Her Eyes,’ which border on redundant. But the rest of the time, it’s a non-issue: songs like ‘Bhang, Bhang, I’m A Burnout,’ ‘Rest Of Our Lives,’ and ‘Jail La La’ are so fetching and pretty it’s difficult not to tap your foot or hum along. This is the kind of album designed to be listened to on repeat.
The spirit of I Will Be is best captured in ‘Everybody’s Out,’ a throwback piece that sounds like an all-girl high school punk band covering the Grease soundtrack in a poorly-insulated garage. It features appropriately Gottehrer-style lyrics: a repeated taunt of “My baby’s better than you,” backed by an angelic refrain of “Yes, he is.” The production is slick and skilfully buried beneath a fine layer of distortion, and the music is undeniably catchy. Dum Dum Girls know what they’re doing and it shows. I Will Be is worth a listen.
