Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be

From a while back, but I quite liked the album. 


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Artist: Dum Dum Girls

Album: I Will Be

Record Label: Sub-pop

Rating: 3.5 stars

The Dum Dum Girls – their name a clever take on the name of an Iggy Pop album called Dum Dum Boys – started out in 2008 as singer Dee Dee Penny’s (real name Kirstin Gundred) solo project. Since then they’ve released a home recorded CDR and a 12” EP. The now four-piece garage pop band has just released their first studio album titled I Will Be, all of eleven songs. The Dum Dum Girls, in their previous recordings, took low fidelity 60’s girl band brand of pop and a cocktail of catchy lyrics and terrific harmonies.  This time around, by buffing up the band with three other members, including Frankie Rose from their suffix-sake girl-group Vivian Girls, Dee Dee has – almost fiercely – turned the Dum Dum Girls into a bonafide rockband. I Will Be was originally slated to be an album about a woman in prison, but in the final product has only one track that keeps to the theme – Jail La La, released as a single earlier this year. Oh Mein Me, sung in German, and a delicate rendering of Sonny and Cher’s Baby Don’t Go, are irrefutably hip with vocals that easily shuttle between fierce, coy and mysterious. The record’s production by Richard Gottehrer is the perfect foil to Dee Dee’s lyrics and the girl’s harmonies, creating mature and latered pop pleasures.