Dance Your Childhood Away

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Dressy Bessy continues its winning streak of 1960s and 1970s throwback power pop on its new album “Holler and Stomp,” which is out today on Transdreamer Records. The Denver quartet isn’t going to reinvent the wheel with its guitar crunch or basic power-pop formula, but there is something whimsically appealing about the band’s giddy exuberance. That something begins with the engaging charisma of vocalist-guitarist Tammy Ealom, whose brisk delivery and unabashedly trite lyrics make Dressy Bessy’s music an easygoing, sugary treat.

“Holler and Stomp,” the band’s fifth album, remains faithful to what Ms. Ealom and company have been doing since their 2003 self-titled release. Dressy Bessy began as a classic girl-group-style band, concocting latter-day Brill Building pop on 1999’s “Pink Hearts Yellow Moons” and 2002’s “Sound Go Round.” On 2003’s “Dressy Bessy,” though, guitarist John Hill — who also plays in the Apples in Stereo — was given the freedom to create big hook chords and sunny melodies, leading the group to a power-pop groove that is equal parts the Kinks and the Buzzcocks.

Since then, Dressy Bessy hasn’t departed from turning out songs perfectly suited for ’60s and ’70s K-Tel Records “super hits” compilations. This is pop music as gleefully superficial as it is bouncing, and Ms. Ealom wisely refrains from overthinking her lyrics. The new album’s “Simple Girlz” is a perfect example: Over a stomping bass-and-drums backbone, Mr. Hill’s three-chord fuzz props up Ms. Ealom’s sprightly vocal, which concerns a boy who wants a simple, happy girl, and how she isn’t the one. “Simple Girlz” isn’t exactly a feminist song, but at just shy of two-and-a-half-minutes, it’s great for an all-skate at the roller rink.

Dressy Bessy is founded upon such simple pleasures. “In Your Headphones” sprints through its two minutes with another one of Mr. Hill’s instantly infectious guitar lines, Ms. Ealom’s golly-gee lyrics, and what sounds like a tambourine inviting the hips to sway and shimmy. “Shoot, I Love You” is a brash ’60s-style love song, complete with nimble melody and Ms. Ealom’s “doo doo” harmonies bolstering the chorus. “Dressed the Part” may be the platonic ideal of a Dressy Bessy song: An ecstatic ode to just the right clothes, it rhapsodizes fashionable appropriation in music that is, itself, just such a designer update.

* * *

Such casual cheekiness is what makes Dressy Bessy such a guilt-free pleasure, because the band and its fans are in on the joke: It’s just backward-looking pop music, nothing more. Such intellectual armature isn’t part of The Veronicas, something that makes their sophomore release, “Hook Me Up” (Sire) a more difficult item to get a handle on. First released in the group’s native Australia last year, “Hook Me Up” is straight-ahead teen dance-pop. That the group is fronted by identical twin sisters, Jessica and Lisa Origliasso, lends it a patina of shtick, as does the fact that four songs here were co-written by Josh Alexander and Billy Steinberg, the songwriting team behind “All About Us,” by the briefly scandalous Russian duo t.A.T.u.

Everything about “Hook Me Up” points to a cynical product in the Hannah Montana-Jonas Brothers mold at first glance. And while “Hook Me Up” very well may be just that, it’s also one of the more instantly fun pop albums out right now.

The 12 songs on “Hook Me Up” range from symphonic techno (“This is How It Feels”) and minimalist ballads (“Take Me on the Floor”) to guitar-powered rockers (“All I Have”) and fey, acoustic-guitar confections (“Revenge Is Sweeter [Than You Ever Were]”), ideally suited for use in a TV teen drama. If that description makes the album sound scattered, the Origliasso sisters find a way to make the helter-skelter production their own.

At their best, The Veronicas make fabulous hybrid pop. “Popular” is about a fairly ordinary piece of high school drama — the chorus is little more than “don’t hate me because I’m popular” — but the song’s rhythmic spine is built on noise bursts that wouldn’t sound out of place at the No Fun festival. “Untouched” is a luxuriant piece of new wave that pairs a dance-floor tempo with a rush of strings.

And the title track may be the most beguiling pop song of the year, one of personal alienation set to an insistent electronic throb. With little more than a programmed skittish beat and synthesizer accents, “Hook Me Up” outlines a young woman’s distressed thoughts and desire to get away, confessing, “I’m not like other girls who always feel so sure / of everything they are, of what they’re gonna be / Sometimes I’m just a girl who’s stuck inside of me.” Young-adult fiction invests pages and often leaden metaphors to capture the alert vulnerability of young women, but the Origliasso sisters do it in 2 minutes and 55 seconds of music you can dance to.

“Hook Me Up” may be another forgettable teen pop album, but at this moment, it’s forgettable pop that sounds refreshingly sincere.

Dressy Bessy performs September 25 at Arlene’s Grocery (95 Stanton St., between Orchard and Ludlow streets, 212-995-1652) and September 26 at Union Hall (702 Union St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, Brooklyn, 718-638-4400).


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