Dee Dee (Kristin Gundred) founded the group as a one-woman recording project in 2008, released a few singles, and experimented with different lineups before staffing the current all-female quartet. She’s proved herself a quick study of the genre’s tropes—brevity (I Will Be clocks in at less than 30 minutes); a sound that undercuts the sunlit harmonies with a shadowy, menacing edge; vocal delivery that seamlessly shifts from wistful, Dear Diary whispers (“Baby Don’t Go”) to icy cool (“It Only Takes One Night”); and a heroine who is fiercely proud and protective of her beau. Compare the Angels’ classic “My Boyfriend’s Back” to this repeated line from I Will Be’s “Everybody’s Out”: “My baby is better than you.”

Unfortunately, another common characteristic of girl groups has been the looming presence of a creepy Svengali type—think of Phil Spector’s demented domination over Ronnie Spector, or Kim Fowley’s handsy management of the Runaways. Despite being one the key progenitors of the girl-group sound, Sire Records co-founder Richard Gotterher, thankfully, was nothing of the sort. Dee Dee sought Gotterher’s aid in producing I Will Be because of his impressive body of work—he wrote “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “I Want Candy” (performed by the Strangeloves, featuring Gotterher and some friends pretending to be Australian) and kept the Brill Building girl-group sound alive for decades by producing seminal albums for Blondie, the Go-Go’s, and recently the Raveonettes. Gotterher’s presence is noticeable on the haunting “Rest of Our Lives,” on which Dee Dee waxes romantic from a teen’s perspective—but in a weary way that implies no happy ending.

The album’s ridiculously catchy highlight is “Jail La La,” wherein the  protagonist has landed in the pokey. Unlike Blondie’s “X Offender,” though, this hitch doesn’t sound like fun. Dee Dee sings, “Oh God, how did I get here/I do not know/I just woke up at this strange show/This woman is clearly out of her mind/She’s covered in shit and high as a kite.” It’s as if Dee Dee thinks all the chorus’ airy la la las will lift her out of prison. They might not, but they certainly earn her band a spot in the girl-group pantheon.

Dum Dum Girls perform tonight at DC9 with Male Bonding and Detox Retox.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.

Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I've collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS's bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer's take on "The Man In Me" is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States' version of "To Ramona," meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups' respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard "This Land Is Your Land" up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week's One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band's recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey's other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division's "Transmission":

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn't make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard's "The Numbered Head"—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It's got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of "Suspect Device" that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: "Firecracker, Firecracker," by Half Japanese, and "Nervous Breakdown," which L.A.'s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins' provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.