Too True

Dee Dee Penny stares coldly out from the cover of Too True, the photo art awash with icy blues and black.

The cold tones suit the album. Initially bashing out of the bedroom, Penny now sits three albums into a celebrated career with her gang, the Dum Dum Girls.

Gone are the group missives of naïve, wide-eyed desire trashed out on guitar; instead, Too True is an assured, and, gulp, ‘mature’ collection of cohesive, big sounding, layered studio-preened sounds. It is just so slick.

The musical layers, part epic goth and 80s diva, are all impressive – a result of both progression and familiarity with the production team of 80s hit-writer Richard Gottehrer and Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner.

Another factor is the grueling grind of touring that came with the band’s breakout success, taking Penny far from home and real life emotions and experiences. Two of the songs were written on drunken, lonely hotel-room nights, with the telling lyrics, “The void in my head, the hole in my heart, I fill them with things that all fall apart”.

Too True is equally fragile and buoyant and at times hard to penetrate, but surely succeeds in Penny’s publicly stated aim of “chasing pop into the dark”.

Watch the clip for ‘Lost Boys And Girls Club’ from Too True here:

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