Entertainment

Variants on a basic garage sound have been brewing for the better part of the last decade. A self-sustaining market’s continued to grow alongside this latest crop of groups who seem to be on the road touring and hawking merchandise every day of the year. While a few bands’ tinny recordings have gained a significant national and international following, Atlanta’s Black Lips for one, there hasn’t been an indisputable, genre-defining ensemble yet. Instead of the scene yielding up a gold-gilded group, record imprints could be responsible for offering fans the definitive garage act.

 “A year ago, the girls literally met at CMJ three days before our first show; we practiced nine hours a day in Brooklyn leading up to it,” Dee Dee Penny, The Dum Dum Girls’ singer and public face, says recounting her shift from solo act to actualized band in last September’s Interview.

The Dum Dum Girls, an all-female garage and pop group from California, are set to perform a few days prior to the Beets appearing in town. With unimpeachable songwriting talent, but admittedly a bit short on the musical acumen, Dee Dee Penny leads the ensemble through a spate of fully realized numbers, replete with emotive vocal-vibrato echoing through choruses. The group’s quick ascent to Sub Pop sponsorship, a graduation from the smaller, newly influential Captured Tracks, and the band’s recent release of the He Gets Me High EP shouldn’t be a stunning revelation at this point. Surely, there are still Smashing Pumpkins fans around. What about Stone Temple Pilots, though? Or Hum.