Gig: Dum Dum Girls

Dum Dum Girls (Minks / Dirty Beaches)

El Mocambo. Saturday, February 26, 2011.

Out to the El Mo for a Saturday night. It'd fill up later, but was still pretty loosely packed as things were stirring to get going. I'd not done any research into the openers, so I knew nothing about Dirty Beaches at the time. The rest of the crowd seemed to be in the same boat, as there was no palpable burst of excitement as a lone figure took that stage. That would turn out to be Montréal's Alex Hungtai, purveyor of heavily reverbed vocals over top of minimal loop-based tracks, stripped-down two-bar rock'n'roll signifiers.

"One hundred hours! One hundred hours! ONE HUNDRED HOURS!" he shouted, kicking in the loop for "Speedway King", establishing from the get-go that although he was always straight-facedly in character, this stuff was goofy and fun and a little over the top. He was clutching a guitar, and at first I thought it was merely a prop for effect, but he did add a noisy solo over "Sweet 17". His vox whirled up from a croon to a shout, and my initial impression — given that rockabilly/Suicide edge and use of loops — what that I'd met some other city's answer to our own Slim Twig, who has spent some time working a similar patch of ground.

Hungtai was mostly playing tracks from his Badlands album (at this show still being sold at the merch table as a CD-R), but there was some other material, including "Lone Runner", recently released as a 7". He also dedicated a cover of Johnny Cash's "The Folk Singer" to recently-passed Trish Keenan of Broadcast, and tellingly, Hungtai introduced it as "The Singer", in the manner of Nick Cave's re-titling.

Hungtai has a certain magnetism on stage, and from the general indifference at the the outset, he managed to attract a respectable crowd moving up to check him out. There were still a lot of people chatting indifferently away, partially drowning out one of his stronger songs, the quieter "Lord Knows Best", with a piano line that manages to express sadness in a jaunty way. The set — seven songs in twenty-five minutes — closed with the "Be My Baby"-evoking "True Blue" (not a Madonna cover). And wrapping up with a sort of geste juste, after chatting with some friends in the crowd while breaking down his gear, he pulled out a comb and slicked back his hair before leaving the stage.

Live, the spectacle and presence help to cover up the songs' most glaring weakness, which is the sheer repetitive nature of the loops. Listening to all of them in the row, I was ready to kill for a bridge or some other melodic variation. There's something to be said for rigourous minimalism, sure, but there's also a limit to it — this is a problem that's more keenly felt in his recorded work. Still, he's got a swagger and persona and a gift for boiling things down, so it'll be interesting to see how he chooses to expand on this promising template.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Brooklyn six-piece MINKS (who apparently like to rock the all caps look) might appear, to the jaded eye, to be a product of Brooklyn rock band central casting, the stage filled with a dude in a toque, a dude in a fedora, a dude in a hoodie and a woman playing keyboards way off to the side. "Welcome to Canada," said Sean Kilfoyle in a slightly-confused reversal for a band making their first appearance in Toronto.

Fresh off the release of their debut, self-titled full-length on Captured Tracks, the band featured occasional unison vocals, slightly-woozy keybs and a glide-y sensibility, but weren't so noisy that you would call them shoegazers. At a few points (like during "Ophelia") I was getting the tang of an AM-happy co-ed Still Life Still. I got the impression that the band was still trying to work out a sweet spot between hazy drift and pop smarts, and at this point they seemed more capable at getting across a mood than embedding hooks. But given a propensity for short songs — there were three in a row that were about two minutes apiece — nothing overstayed its welcome. The problem, however, was that nothing really lingered in my mind after, either. There's no doubt that the band was generically pleasing, but they are perhaps a bit too generic at this point.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Headliners Dum Dum Girls, on the other hand, have already learned a lot about the power of a visual presentation. But despite their striking appearance — I don't know if there's any way to write about this band without using the word "gams" — and despite having a couple guys to set up their equipment and remaining unseen until they took the stage, the dramatic "reveal" was somewhat spoiled by the fact they still needed to stand in place and tune for a minute before launching into a striking, moody version of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire".

Singer/guitarist Kristen Gundred (moving increasingly away from insisting on stage name Dee Dee Dum Dum as the band's profile increases) then took it up a notch with "He Gets Me High", title track of the band's then-just-about-to-be-released EP, with a buzzsaw wah-wah guitar line, and first of a series of songs showing off the band's rawer side. That included the fabulous "Catholicked" (from their debut EP, and one of the band's best songs), cheekily paying tribute to Patti Smith by ripping off her "Jesus died for somebody's sins / but not mine" line, and then rolled along with "I Will Be" and "Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout" before taking the foot off the accelerator for the smouldering "Take Care of My Baby". The latter would be one of the pivotal songs on the EP, a slower, more intense composition where Gundred could show off her vibrato — giving people a chance to fall over each other by making Chrissie Hynde comparisons.

"Take Care of My Baby" was so spectacular that it made "Jail La La" — hitherto something like the band's calling card single — sound more like mere juvenilia. Although it is indeed a kicking little bit of work, and live, it came off significantly faster than its recorded version, propelled by drummer Sandy Vu.

There were a couple peeks ahead to what would become second album Only in Dreams with "In My Head" and "Teardrops on My Pillow", and there was also the still-unreleased "Lavender Haze". The main set closed with an extra-Pretender-y version of "Rest of Our Lives" before the band returned to tackle the only remaining unplayed track from the EP: their go-for-gusto cover of The Smiths' "There is a Light That Never Goes Out".

Although the band is eminently watchable, they were pretty static on stage¹ — or, perhaps more exactly, carefully modulated. There was a sense of rigourous professionalism here, and it seemed like even the very rock'n'roll act of taking a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels was performed with an exact sense of the semiotics encoded within it. And as for Gundred's lyrics (filled with signifiers like "baby", "dream" and "bed"), it's not yet clear whether she's deliberately using a limited vocabulary for a particular effect or that she just doesn't have much to say. Still, all the signs of a band on the cusp here, with several glimpses of the step forward that Only in Dreams would later announce. There was no doubt even then that their next show in town would be in a larger venue.

This came out sounding great, so a few selections from this set: check out an older song here, or a couple He Gets Me High-era songs here.

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¹ The abstract lightshow being projected on the screen behind Gundred also helped add a sense of motion on the stage.