Working as Haunted Hearts, Dee Dee of Dum Dum Girls and her husband Brandon Welchez of Crocodiles have made an album loosely based around the S&M scene in New York during the 1970s and ‘80s. Romanticizing the New York of decades past—never mind its taboo fetish clubs, celebrity-filled S&M dungeons, and the pervasive sexual landscape of pre-Giuliani Manhattan—is a tricky task in 2014, when just a few clicks away are hundreds of no wave, post-punk, and electroclash bands who were actually there at the time. Haunted Hearts don’t exactly unearth the scabrous New York of yesteryear; rather, they become the Ghost of Manhattan's Past and fly us over punk, sex, rebellion, and death-marked love while never taking us deeply into it.
Still, it's honest music from the noise-pop couple, both of whom come into this project having broadened their sound within their own respective bands. Dum Dum Girls’ LP from earlier this year, Too True, featured Dee Dee moving out of the lo-fi ‘60s girlgroup and into lusher, dreamier decades, adding a slinky low range to her already powerful voice. Welchez’s work in Crocodiles, while still nipping at the heels of the Jesus and Mary Chain and other Ray Ban-wearing bands of the ‘80s, expand its sonic range on Crimes of Passion. Call it holy matrimony, but husband and wife pull each back to the safe zone on *Initiation—*these songs sound good and comfy. The power of Dee Dee’s belt or Welchez’s fuzz stomp all defer to a beautiful bluish gauze, one that only sort of reflects the kinky cynicism that sits at the core of these songs.
They write at pain and pleasure fairly overtly in "Something That Feels Bad Is Something That Feels Good" and continue in the same vein on "Up Is Up (But So Is Down)." The latter plays out like a scene from some '70s art house film with characters calling the "trash man" to "get their garbage flowing" and a mother who "flushes all her fun to keep her brain from humming." It's a lonely song that lazily gyrates to a drum shuffle that recalls just about everything J. Spaceman and Richard Ashcroft have ever done. There are a few surprises here, but their comfort with each other gives these songs a certain ease. Hang up red curtains, shine a flashlight on a tiny disco ball, throw on a sequin dress, and sway back and forth until you are on the same page with Haunted Hearts. That's the scene to set if you really want the blend of their voices and the hum of the synths to move you.
Problem is, the fuzzy approximations of heroin kisses and blissed-out dreams just never find an identity of their own. When "Johnny Jupiter" comes on, just the name "Johnny" brings to mind one of the most iconic names used in music to being so cool, to being angry, to being a shooting star, to name only a few. It speaks to Haunted Hearts' obsession with the knee-jerk signifiers that surround the record—devil-may-care anti-heroes, drag queens and Hubert Selby Jr. novels, intravenous parties and dead-eyed dancing. But it just stays so symmetrical. Dee Dee and Welchez sing about love in such a detached way, you won't know where their ennui ends and yours begins.
The Dee Dee-featured ballad "Love Incognito" is a welcome ray of sunshine. She finally opens up on the chorus with words plain and sweet, "I see you/ Yes I do/ You didn't think I could." Thanks to her energy on the chorus, the song blossoms out in a way the midtempo mod rock surrounding it never quite does. But it still all adds up to something so familiar and unspecific—straight songs whose subject matter beg them to be anything but. Maybe it's the intimacy they shared recording this together in their apartment while holed up over last winter, spinning krautrock and Spiritualized records that drove them so far away from the outside world and into themselves. On the closing epilogue "Bring Me Down", the couple coo to each other, "Well you've been bad/ But you're the best I've ever had." It plays like the last song on a Love Mixtape they made for each other; a comp about Haunted Hearts' little secrets and favorite music that ultimately means more to Dee Dee and Welchez than anyone else.
