5ingles

The Dum Dum Girls
"Hold Your Hand"

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More About

• Johnny O'Donnell
• Dum Dum Girls
• Pat Benatar
• Kristin Gundred
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Kristin Gundred relates a hymn not of helplessness, but of instructive empathy—albeit while dressed exactly like a Pat Benatar impersonator from Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

"All my friends, it seems, are cracking up/Alcohol has turned our brains to mush," O'Donnell begins over sub-Jim Croce California claptrap rock, and his grimaces only deepen from there. This is a survivor's lament, hangdog and sodden, imbued with the kind of survivor's guilt all the tequila in Cabo won't wash away.

"Trust" is theme and practice alike for the sisters Larson: They preach it ferociously, even as they test the outer limits of yours, jackknifing from muffled, misfiring sirens to mystical world-pop to Goddess knows what else.

"World" puts me in mind of rider-less subway-car trails shuddering around the spires and through the bowels an urban landscape in ruins, screaming all the way—a world decimated, demolished, diminished.

If Katsuhiko Maeda were a Doom Patrol rogue's gallery reject, he'd undoubtedly be Agent "!"