Review Summary: Another short and sweet effort among other short and sweet offerings.
The latest sampling from garage-tinged pop outfit Dum Dum Girls is just that. A sampling of how far the band’s lo-fi dream pop aesthetic can be toyed around with in 18 minutes of audio. 18 minutes that feel like an appropriate gesture from a band that has been pushing out releases on a rapid basis from 2010. Now, you may be wondering, how far do they go? They start out with tried and true on the opener “Mine Together”, get surfy on “I Got Nothing”, play around with ambience on “Trees and Flowers”, go back to their roots on “Lord Knows” (HUH!) and then close things off 80s girl group style with “Season in Hell”. So as you can tell this little EP travels far but just how much is the trip worth it?
In all honesty, the mini journey doesn’t start off that well on the opener. First and foremost, they lyrics make an attempt to pull on one’s heart strings with lines like “Satan on my lips, Paralyzed by his wicked kiss”. They shoot to be deep but ironically enough only feel shallow. To make matters worse all the bare bones riffage gets accompanied by either a drum machine or some very heavily edited hi hats that bury the rest of the song underneath it’s presence.
Aside from this seemingly pummeling misstep, the rest of the EP is pretty smooth sailing. “I Got Nothing” trucks on with some muted but persistent surf drumming and a nice major to minor progression on the bass line that can immediately suck in listeners.
Up next is the gorgeous “Trees and Flowers”. A beatless wonder being carried by Dee Dee’s least subdued vocal performance on the EP being backed by some very beautiful, reverb-drenched arpeggios. “Lord Knows” features some cathedral-sized reverb on some very lofty, uprising skins taking presence on top of the bands usual helping of reverb; guitars stopping by occasionally to fill the void. To wrap things up we are left with “Season in Hell” sporting some of the EP’s most anthemic guitar playing on top of some intrusive but uplifting drumming.
Overall, nothing has changed here in retrospective to the rest of the Dum Dum Girl’s catalogue. Dee Dee’s vocals are more subdued as mentioned before but music wise and sound wise it’s just another solid offering that will give it’s listeners enough great content to tide them over until the next LP, or even another EP, gets thrown out into the masses.
My Score = 8.2
