When Dum Dum Girls first made themselves known a couple of years ago they were right on time: boldly taking the ‘girl band’ label and giving it a very welcome injection of 60’s surf and 90’s dream-pop, right in the middle of the ‘Primary Colours’ shoegaze revival . In an impressive feat they managed to continuously smother the simplest of chord structures with scorching harmonies and Sonic Youth guitar effects, producing some fantastic and nostalgic pieces of music. 2 albums later, they’re set to release a new EP, ‘End of Daze’ on the legendary Sub Pop label.
‘Lord Knows’ is a booming, dreamy ballad: a nice little tune, but disappointingly using all the same textures and sounds as everything else in Dum Dum Girls’s back catalogue. Subtlety obviously wasn’t the intention when they chose to record the drums in the biggest, emptiest room they could find, or in unashamedly pinching the chords from The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sweet Jane’. I understand that their whole ‘thing’ is pastiche, but it wasn’t even a year ago that ‘Coming Down’ (another ballad), a shameless re-hash of Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’, was released as a single. I had hoped that this band would have evolved a bit more over time, but this song would suggest that that is not the case.

Words: James Balmont