These two artists are similar in how they’ve absolutely surprised me with their respective new albums. I was never really a Dum Dum Girls fan until I heard their pretty rad cover of The Smiths’ “There is a Light That Will Never Go Out” last year. With their new End of Daze EP, they won me over. I lived down the hallway from our other artist, Joseph Mulhollen, in college and always knew he was capable of making a great album after seeing him play about a dozen times. A decade later, he has.
Dum Dum Girls
End of Daze EP
Sub Pop
Over a short three-year period, Dum Dum Girls vocalist and mastermind Dee Dee has grown up before our very eyes. Her early albums received a lot of critical attention for their throwback punk sound, but it seems as though Dee Dee wasn’t content to complacently sit by and regurgitate her interpretations of The Ramones. Instead, another of her influences, Patti Smith, might provide a better career benchmark—certainly not in sound, but in terms of growth and reinvention. End of Daze marks Dee Dee’s best songwriting to date—a more mature form of the au courant dreamy pop rock the college kids love these days.
Check out a video for the single “Lord Knows” here:
Joseph Mulhollen
Problematical Animals
Scenic Route
You probably haven’t yet heard of Joseph Mulhollen, but Problematical Animals should be the album that gets him national notice. Originally from Buffalo and now based in Baltimore, Mulhollen transformed his sound from acoustic folk to full-fledged chamber pop over the past few years. Reminiscent of like-minded artists like Andrew Bird and Parenthetical Girls, Mulhollen possesses a tremendously operatic voice. But he’s really come on strong as an inventive composer. Problematical Animals is a gem of an album, one filled with the pain, love and emotion of a true storyteller.
Mulhollen just released the incredibly provocative video for “Missing Contact.” Check it out below: