Review Summary: "Too true, too true, too true, to be good."
Repetition plays an essential role in music. Without it, listeners get lost and distracted. It magnifies certain points, ingrains patterns into the mind of the audience, and allows for easier recognition. However, too much, and one ends up with an incongruous blob of similar sounds.
On “Too True,” the third studio album from the all-female dream-pop quartet, Dum Dum Girls, repetition is so prevalent that by the end of its short 31 minute run time I was itching to put on something different.
It wasn’t that the music itself was bad -- I found myself bobbing my head and tapping my feet on more than one occasion. Intro song, “Cult of Love,” combined a fast paced drum beat with a guitar riff straight from an old-western gun fight in such a way that I wanted to get up and dance. The bass line reminiscent of Silversun Pickups on “Evil Blooms” and the distorted guitar riff that flared in and out of the upbeat “Little Minx” were pleasant breaks in the monotonous wall of sound that characterized “Too True.”
However, those songs-- coincidentally also the three shortest on the album-- were the exception, not the rule. More common were tracks like first single “Rimbaud Eyes,” which repeats the phrase “You got Rimbaud eyes” 14 times. It takes lead singer Dee Dee Penny six seconds to get that phrase out each time, which means that one minute and 24 seconds of the three and a half minute song is taken up by that one utterance. It’s not the only track with that problem, and it gets old fast.
“Are You Okay?” repeats “You say, ‘Are you okay?’” 12 times; “Too True To Be Good,” repeats the line “too true” an absurd 28 times; and “Under These Hands” -- which sounds surprisingly close to the musical theme for “American Hustle” -- repeats its title at least 17 times.
See how annoying that is?
I could keep counting and chronicling the ridiculous repetition on each song, but it would be a fruitless exercise. The point is that Dum Dum Girls likes to repeat itself. A lot.
Couple that with 31 minutes of bass heavy, Metric-esque, subdued dream pop, in which the song structures rarely progress beyond their initial catchy intro, and you get one boring hodgepodge of great musical ideas that never realize their full potential.
Hopefully, next time around, Dum Dum Girls will be willing to step out of their comfort zone and make some music that doesn’t strictly stick to one sound. Because no matter how good the band is at their brand of restrained pop music -- and they are quite good at it -- too much of the same is never good.
The verdict: Despite a pleasantly catchy underlying sound, too much repetition bogs down and prevents Dum Dum Girls from reaching its true potential.
2.6/5
