So, I ordered two copies of the debut full-length LP from Dum Dum Girls -- one from HoZac and one from Sub Pop. My HoZac copy came in the mail this morning & I'm listening to it now! If you're not familiar with Dum Dum Girls, they have a really wonderful sound heavily influenced by sixties Phil Spector-style pop. Heavy on echoing vocals and layered guitars, they describe their sound as "blissed out buzzsaw" and I can't think of a better way to describe it. Some AllMusic keywords for Dum Dum Girls that make me happy: freewheeling, rowdy, swaggering, bright, ramshackle.
I Will Be is 11 tracks long, 10 originals and one Sonny & Cher cover ("Baby Don't Go.") HoZac put out two presses, 200 on an orangey-gold vinyl and 800 on black. I managed to snag a gold one, it looks lovely! The HoZac edition also sports a slightly different cover than the Sub Pop release. Both use the same photo of Dee Dee's mom, but the HoZac cover is black & white with no text & the Sub Pop cover is a color photo with the album title and band name in the upper right hand corner.
The album opener, "It Only Takes One Night" is great, but I really preferred the second track, "Bhang Bhang, I'm A Burnout" (this is something that I definitely foresee putting on a lot of mixes.) "Jail La La," the first single from the album is also on side A & holds up really well. I loved the "Jail La La" single when it came out earlier this year and listened to it so much that I was worried I might be sick of it by the time I heard the album. Fortunately, that's definitely not the case. The closing track on the A side, "Rest Of Our Lives," is a beautiful slow one. Generally speaking, I'm not crazy about slow songs, but this one is really nice & rounds out the first side perfectly.
"Yours Alone," the first track on the B side is a fantastic fast-paced song about playground love that made an appearance on a previously released 12". "Blank Girl," a slower duet with Brandon Welchez follows. Weirdly, the album's title track, "I Will Be," strikes me as being totally forgettable -- maybe I'll feel differently upon future listens? I'm similarly underwhelmed by the following number, "Lines Her Eyes" -- though that one's growing on me even as I write this sentence. I do like "Everybody's Out" quite a bit & the album's closing track, a cover of
To my knowledge, HoZac doesn't have any more copies of I Will Be on colored vinyl, but they still have some on black. You can order I Will Be from HoZac here.
You can also get I Will Be from Sub Pop, who is still accepting pre-orders. If you order before March 30th (this coming Tuesday), you'll get a CD-R with 5 previously released "rare" Dum Dum Girls tracks ("rare" is in quotes only because chances are you could easily find these tracks online.) To pre-order, go here
Dum Dum Girls are currently on tour with Girls! Drew and I are catching them next week & I'm pretty stoked. It will be our third time seeing Girls, but I've never seen Dum Dum Girls before & am pretty pumped about it.
You can sample some Dum Dum Girls tracks & peruse tour date on their MySpace page. Dum Dum Girls also have a sparsely updated blog here.
Some good news: If you missed out on Blissed Out, the Dum Dum Girls cassette collecting out of print recordings recently released by Art Fag, they've done a second run of tapes & you can get one here for $10.
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