“I obviously know what my first seven-inch sounds like, what [first album] I Will Be sounds like, what the EP sounds like, and what this record sounds like,” Dee Dee states in regard to the gradual leap into the realm of high fidelity. “For me, it just makes a lot of sense. It feels like a very natural progression, one that reflects the fact that it went from a bedroom recording project to a full band who has been on tour together for a year solid. It doesn’t feel like a stylistic difference to me, it feels like we’ve had access to a higher fidelity. I feel like I’m still able to do all the noise that I love and like to maintain in my music, but now the palette in which to do it with is even larger.”
The release of Only In Dreams follows on from He Gets Me High, the EP which dropped at the start of 2011. As Dee Dee explains, the EP marked a stepping stone into the LP, as to now mark a jarring transition between records. “Definitely, it had to happen. First of all, I Will Be essentially was a collection of songs that I recorded by myself – you could regard them as demos. Upon signing with Sub Pop, I could have rendered them as demos and gone into the studio and redone everything. But that wasn’t appropriate, it’s not what I wanted to do. So we put out that record as-is,” she recalls. “But I don’t want to make that record again and again. I definitely topped out on what I was capable of doing on my own. With the EP, it was a bit of an experiment to see what it was like stepping out of just my head basically – giving [producers] Richard Gottehrer and Sune [Wagner] a bit more of a say. Maybe not giving them more of a say, but basically using them to a better degree. Richard essentially produced the first record, but I just handed him the record and he did what he could with what I had done. Whereas this was a case of seeing what we could do when it was a bit more traditional. This record even more so, because it was with the band, recording in a proper studio.”
The classic styling of the group not only permeates their recorded output, but encompasses the broader aesthetic. The four-piece cut a fine figure when onstage, aided by an almost-uniform layout of vintage guitars. “I think I’m always going to have preferences. For me it’s as much about the fact that it’s an old guitar and it sounds great – but as it is, it’s my first guitar that I wrote my first songs on. I’m very sentimental in that regard. At this point I’m still using the guitar I started with, but Jules [guitarist] has moved on to a much better guitar that works much better for what she does. We’re not chained to the sound that we had, we try to do what is appropriate for songs,” she muses. “For the most part, we have a pretty consistent palette. With every record that we’ve done, it’s been like that. That’s something that I like to have on a record. I want there to be that consistent skeleton of sound so that it’s cohesive sonically as well as thematically. With this record, we definitely took advantage of using space as a tool, or filling space with additional things that in the past we hadn’t done so much. Everybody’s pretty specific and knowledgeable about what they like to play, and it all thankfully fits very much into the band’s aesthetic.”
While Dum Dum Girls do lean towards that distinct classic pop sound on their new record, it would be a far stretch to claim the group anything close to derivative. “I have no desire to recreate anything – I obviously acknowledge and celebrate everything that has inspired me,” Dee Dee proclaims. “It would be silly to try and distance myself from that. I’m a music fan through and through. It’s what I grew up on, it’s what keeps me sane. What I love will always find its way into what I do.”
