The Singles Jukebox

We love a bit of Dum Dum Girls here, but do we love a Dum Dum Girls girl?

[Video][Website]
[6.73]

Katherine St Asaph: Dee Dee Ramone is going to make 12 more “Lost Boys and Girls Club”s — this version is hi-NRG, with one note clipped off the chorus riff — and I couldn’t be happier.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Well, if Blondie could do it, so can the frontwoman for Dum Dum Girls. The electronics are A-range, the vocal has more enthusiasm than the awkward verses.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: I don’t understand why child from the Dum Dum Girls wants a name like an aspiring Suicide Girl from Myspace-circa 06, where she unearthed that terrible fake British accent she’s dripping all over the place, or where this kinda clunky bit of electro pulse was supposed to go, especially with this terrible chorus. You know, not everything is great just because it’s goth.
[2]

Cassy Gress: A commanding double-tracked hi-NRG vocal submits in the chorus to precise vocal acrobatics.  I’d argue that “excommunicate” is an odd choice of word to apply to a relationship, but this is the only genre I think it may work in.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: If you compare your love to a haunting, you best have the music to back up such dramatic ideas. Kristin Kontrol does not let that idea down, and “X-Communicate” holds nothing back. The trappings of bad ’80s recreations lurk in its bones — synth pads, drum machine, lyrics with a poetic bend — but Kristin Welchez never treats any element of this song less than seriously, letting every bit rumble forward to that chorus. And dear goodness, what a reckoning it ends up being, Welchez turning a do-we-or-don’t-we situation into something that sounds as vital as it feels like.
[9]

Juana Giaimo: Kristin Kontrol is evidently a departure from her previous projects, but it’s another one in which she never seems to fully engage. How much would the song change if it had guitars instead of synths? 
[5]

Jer Fairall: Edging closer to pure pop then her old band’s what if the Pretenders had been produced by Phil Spector approach, the former Dee Dee Penny puts her marvellous voice to another provocative use; where many indie-rockers-go-pop experiments tend to reveal the deficiencies of their performers when faced with anything resembling formalism, “X-Communicate” displays both a knack and a comfort for this kind of classic (at least if our current understanding of “classic” is the 1980s, and many seem to think it is) pop melodrama unrivalled by any current star who isn’t Carly Rae Jepsen. As a single, “X-Communicate” is good-not-great — the chorus never quite delivers as powerfully as I keep expecting it to — but I’m excited to see where she’s going with this.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Here, it’s the love that has transgressed, and the lovers have to do right by the faith. Were English not her first language, it’d seem like some Italo-disco profundity: something happened upon. Everything snaps to; she sings about being tired but everything save that guitar figure is tensing up.
[6]

Will Adams: It sounds like it was run through a couple hundred filters in the name of 80s verisimilitude (which makes it a bit stuffy) but that chorus is kinda undeniable.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: What an ugly, awkward word to use as the basis of a chorus, which makes this a pretty difficult dive from the get go. The Dum Dum Girls’ leader pulls off the manoeuvre well, though, thanks to a chorus that punches heavily while its beats thud along with the steely force of a lost New Order single. Oh and that outro might as well be a lost New Order single of its own.
[8]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The Dreaming-era Kate Bush + Low-Life-era New Order + SAW-era Bananarama = This. And it’s awesome. Most surprisingly, no Swedish producer on sight. 
[7]