I Want To Feel Something Today

Dum Dum Girls “Too True To Be Good”

It occurred to me the other day that the songwriter Dee Dee from Dum Dum Girls has the most in common with is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. They both adhere to a very classic sense of pop songwriting and structure, and their respective catalogs follow a loose timeline of trends in 20th century pop, as though they could not consider doing different sorts of pastiche out of chronological order. Too True is the Dum Dum Girls’ ’80s album, and the aesthetic suits Dee Dee very well. In the broadest sense, the record is like a Bangles album produced for 4AD, or if The Go-Gos merged with The Cure. She’s always done best with songs that have a bit of romance, and the rich, echoey ambience of ’80s pop is ideal for that. A lot of the songs on the record are about some transcendent emotion or lust cutting through the murk and gloom of life. “Too True To Be Good,” a particularly Cure-ish number, really drives this idea home — it’s basically about being fascinated with a woman who makes you feel more alive until you start to suspect she’s draining something from your life.

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