Dum Dum Girls – Lost Boys and Girls Club
TOO YOUNG! TOO YOUNG TO RULE THE PUBLICATIOOOONNNNNNNN!
[Video][Website]
[6.44]
Megan Harrington: In 2011, I would listen to “Coming Down” and Girls’ “Vomit” back to back like I’d discovered the double helix of love lost. Maybe if I was still draping myself in sorrow’s rags “Lost Boys and Girls Club” would sound more like science and less like a cocktail recipe.
[4]
Jer Fairall: Any band that sounds like Chrissie Hynde backed by Spector’s Wall of Sound wins my heart easily, as Dum Dum Girls did on the incandescent Only in Dreams. Applying several layers of murk and slowing the melody down to a gothy pace isn’t enough to undo a dynamite concept, but it does overdramatize something that already had found, via its various lineages, an ideal expression of pop-as-melodrama. Thankfully, Dee Dee’s arresting vocals rarely bear the weight of her surroundings.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Corrupted goth angst and sadomasochism as post-house spectacle, but slightly sweeter and less bitter.
[7]
Tara Hillegeist: Ah, the days when Siouxsie and Bobby were bandmates; I miss them too, but with Rich Gottehrer behind the boards doing his best Ariel Rechtshaid impression, I can’t help but wonder if liking it as much as I do’s just inviting Chris Ott to show up at the door to my house, shriekingly, like my corner of media criticism’s answer to Lemongrab, and I might well deserve it. Ah well. It’s pretty, so who cares, right?
[7]
Brad Shoup: Something about that elemental guitar melody wrapped in warm night air. It’s a bit like the Horrors’ “Still Life”: big and brittle, an ancient column of a tune. The words are a combination of wink and wizardry: almost too good for whichever three CW shows it’s been cast in. The title is the off-message bit, but it’s embellished with narcotic melodic curlicues: they thought of everything.
[9]
Ramzi Awn: Bits of ambient anthems float throughout “Lost Boys and Girls Club” like days gone by, and the guitars meld into vocals like a dream come true. The chorus doesn’t hurt, either.
[7]
Alfred Soto: “There’s no particular place we are going,” they repeat over drum programs and variegated feedback as if they still lived in the golden age of Creation Records. “Still we are going,” they remind us.
[5]
Jessica Doyle: I love “In My Head” beyond all reason. This does not feel even tangentially related to “In My Head.” It feels like a sludgy reimagining of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I wonder if the Dum Dum Girls gave exactly the same amount of care and attention to the making of this song that H&M gives to the making of its clothes.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: I see through this completely. I know exactly which Smiths and Siouxsie and NIN and, hell, even Tears For Fears records have been pulped and polished into this, which disaffected-youth angst is being sold to me. I know exactly how that high-serious video grabs me, and how disdainfully those kids would look at me if I ran into them en venue as I squirmed in my ill-fitting pleather skirt. I know exactly where the Dum Dum Girls are in the hype cycle, exactly what happened to the Vivian Girls and exactly how much press Frankie Rose and Sisu got for their attempts at this sound. (Not enough.) I know, goddamnit, that the album is being sold as Bangerz for Goths. And I know, most of all, about everything in my life that pants to feel more cinematic. I know what I fall for, and I know not to resist.
[10]
I definitely listened to a Kiss in the Dreamhouse on the way to work, so maybe I was too hard on the Dum Dums.
I rewrote my blurb twice to try and convey how much I disliked this without sounding mean — the first drafts had multiple references to goth and quasi-goth people I eventually fell out with in college, which may be the problem right there — and I didn’t succeed. Under the circumstances, I’m glad to be the outlier.
one thing we can all agree on, though, was that tara wins
ah, the old Beetlejuice play