Missed The 50: Dum Dum Girls

Missed The 50
Dum Dum Girls
‘I Will Be’
(Sub Pop)

I have the feeling that somewhere along the way this wonderful record was lost on an ocean of ears that were flooded and fed up with the torrent of lo-fi, reverb-heavy, garage girl bands that saturated the music industry this year. It was even lost in my record collection after a while, following countless listens to Vivian Girls, Best Coast, and more recently, Frankie Rose And The Outs, there was only so much left to appreciate about sublime harmonies, bittersweet heartache-infused lyrics, and “buzzsaw guitars”. This is a classic case of “too much of a good thing” – and as far as I’m concerned, Dum Dum Girls occupy the higher end of this particular “good thing” spectrum.

Influenced not only by the likes of the Shirelles, Ronettes and Shangri-Las, but by the Stooges, Ramones and Vaselines, Dee Dee (for at the time of the album’s recording Dum Dum Girls was a solo operation) tints her vintage girl group fixation with punk grit and the odd moment of claws-out high school riot grrrl ‘tude. The dynamics throughout are fantastic, tumbling from the high drama prison cell vibe of ‘Jail La La’ into the swooning, utterly besotted love song, ‘Rest Of Our Lives’, then lurching into paranoia and jealousy on ‘Lines Her Eyes’, an up-tempo rant about a copycat rival.

What I really like about ‘I Will Be’ is that it was almost entirely born of four track bedroom recordings; when Sub Pop phoned up Blondie producer, Richard ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ Gottehrer, to get him involved, he was so into the original demo sound that he used it as a template for the mixing and producing he eventually did. In that sense this is a nostalgic album rather than a throwback; its heart is planted somewhere in the late 1960s – all Motown beats, fuzzy guitar and reverb vocals – and its head is firmly in the present – Kristin Gundred (aka Dee Dee) going all gushy for her husband, Crocodiles frontman Brandon Welchez (who puts in an appearance on ultra-sweet coming of age ballad, ‘Blank Girl’) as well as expressing her fear and uncertainty as he goes off on tour without her, pleading, “Don’t forget me,” on urgent album opener ‘It Only Takes One Night’.

I’m also totally enamoured with Gundred’s voice. It suits the signature reverb effect perfectly, with a classy fullness that seamlessly cranks up to an urgent retro squall for slightly random German offering ‘Oh Mein Me’, and glows golden on the title track. Which brings me to the key reason why ‘I Will Be’ stands out from the rest of the retro girl group scene: it is versatile and ballsy. It boasts the class and sweetness of sixties pop, the brazenness of punk, and the fearless honesty of a one-woman girl group who embraces her deep love for music, her man, the past, the present, and is determined that her songs remain relevant in the future and don’t stagnate and die with some fleeting musical trend. I think this record will survive 2010.