They may not have invented the idea, but ever since the Everly Brothers sang “whenever I want you / all I have to do / is dream”, songwriters in their thousands have used dreams as a way to express their deepest longings. Most, like Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline and, uh, Mariah Carey, follow in the Everly Brothers’ romantic footsteps, to a world where dreams have the magical power to connect a lonely singer with his or her one true love (whether or not the love is reciprocated).

There’s a darker side to this sort of dreaming, though. The Everly Brothers hinted at it, and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” expands on it: the dream is only an illusion, a happy lie that sets you up for more pain when you wake up all alone. It’s this kind of bittersweet attitude that informs Dum Dum Girls’ record Only In Dreams, but with more pain than mere loneliness.

It’d be easy to read song titles like “Wasted Away”, “Teardrops On My Pillow” and “Hold Your Hand” as love-struck melodrama in the vein of the 60s pop that bears such a sonic influence on Dum Dum Girls’ sound, but lyrics like “He [Death] sleeps in her bed” make the true subject clear.

The woman in question is the mother of Dum Dum Girls’ lead singer and songwriter Dee Dee (Kristen Gundred on her birth certificate). Following a seemingly minor balance issue, an MRI revealed a number of tumours growing in her head, which, despite surgery, ultimately claimed her life. The shock of this loss has clearly (and quite reasonably) had a huge impact on Dee Dee, and subsequently on Only In Dreams.

There’s an astounding amount of raw emotion in play, and Dee Dee expresses it with a directness and urgency that speaks volumes about how much her mother meant to her. So when Dee Dee worries that she’ll "never sleep again”, it’s not a crush that’s keeping her up; when she begs for “you to come visit me when I’m dreaming”, it comes loaded with a sadness far greater than any lonesome lover could understand. The most affecting moment is the album’s kind-of title track, “Wasted Away”, where Dee Dee makes desperate offers to bring her mother back, to “steal [her] rings and make these your hands” and waste away in her place, rather than see her “only in dreams”.

That Dum Dum Girls’ music is so wrapped up in a garage-pop update of girl-group sounds only makes Only In Dreams even more devastating. Girl group pop was an unusually fertile field for writing sad songs and smuggling them inside giddy melodies, so it provides the perfect vehicle for this very cathartic-yet-catchy expression.

There are a few instances on Only In Dreams where the subject matter isn’t so heavy: "Always Looking" is a straight-up love song in the classic pop vein, and "Just A Creep" is, well, pretty self-explanatory. The latter is pretty disposable, and, though the former is a great slice of fuzz-rock, it gets forgotten in amongst the (emotionally) heavier material. In an interview with Pitchfork, Dee Dee hoped that other people might be able to relate to Only In Dreams on a deep level; by that measure, Only In Dreams is an unmitigated success.

Review Score: 8/10