As fantastic a live band as the Dirtbombs are, their recordings often seem like an excuse for Mick Collins to demonstrate how broad his taste is. ("You like Soft Cell and Flipper and Carl Craig? I thought I was the only one!") Around 10 years ago, Collins started talking about making a bubblegum album with the group; now that they've made their garage-covers-of-Detroit-techno album and their garage-covers-of-Sparks single and their garage-covers-of-INXS single, they've finally gotten around to it.
Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!, it turns out, isn't garage covers of bubblegum hits, or even bubblegum obscurities: it's 10 new, original bubblegum songs (rendered, of course, into the Dirtbombs' fuzzed-out two-drummer, two-bassist garage-rock idiom). It's a strange, awkward record, hampered by irreconcilable incompatibilities between its genre and its presentation.
For one thing, bubblegum is a one-song-at-a-time form—it's very hard to take an entire 1910 Fruitgum Company album, say—and, although Ooey Gooey is only half an hour long, it feels like eating dessert for half an hour straight. For another, trying to impose an artistic personality on performing bubblegum is a historical anomaly. The initial wave of bubblegum music was about as far from artist-driven as pop can be. It was the creation of producers and songwriters (the key figures included Jerry Kasenetz, Jeffrey Katz, and Joey Levine, among others), and the singers and musicians were interchangeable to the point that four entirely different lineups of Ohio Express had hit singles between 1967 and 1969. This record, though, is about the band, not the material: Collins' rough, drawling voice is right up front, and despite production flourishes here and there, the Dirtbombs always sound like themselves, wearing Halloween "sexy bubblegum studio group" outfits that don't fit them particularly well.
The real failure of Ooey Gooey, though, is that these songs aren't particularly good pastiches. They're formally accurate: dumbed-down riffs, hippie tropes, easy rhymes, references to candy. But stupidity alone doesn't make for wonderful bubblegum. The hits by the Archies and the Lemon Pipers and the Kasenetz-Katz bands were great pop music for five-year-olds, which isn't an insult—five-year-olds have serious bullshit detectors. "Sugar Sugar" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy" are fine-tuned machines, stripped of everything that doesn't instantly give pleasure, and graced with detailed, constantly shifting arrangements to hold their intended audience's attention. The Dirtbombs' songs here, though, generally have one really good idea apiece: the cowbell tattoo that runs through "Sugar on Top", say, or the innocent/lascivious conceit of "Girl on the Carousel". That's not enough for what they're trying to pull off.
To be fair, it would have been easy for Collins and company to have made Ooey Gooey's songs smirkier, or to play up the dessert/oral sex metaphors more than they do (only "Hey! Cookie" really falls into that trap: "Ooh, such a groovy scene/ Gonna make sure I lick the plate clean"). There are a handful of very clever gestures scattered across the album, too, especially its closing track "We Come in the Sunshine", a homage to 60s song-mills' habit of carbon-copying hits. (Its verses are Collins' approximation of "Good Vibrations".) Mostly, though, Ooey Gooey is a proof-of-concept album—yes, the Dirtbombs can Dirtbombify this ordinarily unscuzzy genre, too—rather than one that plays to the band's considerable strengths.
