This review came from my days submitted big gaggles of words to the Central Florida alternative weekly The Independent Journal, a publication willed into being by one of the most creative, ambitious people I know. As you can clearly surmise, I was still smarting from the pronounced disappointment of the Liz Phair album I’d written about a week or two earlier. 

Hey, not every record has to change the world. There are hearts and minds for the winning by just locking onto an enjoyable sound and sticking to it. Enter Dressy Bessy. On their third album, Tammy Eaton leads the band through eleven guitar-pop soap bubbles: awful pretty while they’re floating along, but not all that memorable when they suddenly disappear. There’s steady usage of the amps and an aversion to lagging tempos throughout. Just because the lyrics are lamenting a duplicitous friend of lackluster parenting, there’s no reason to break into maudlin acoustic moaning. That compulsive adherence to the champagne and Pop Rocks sound suits the material well, especially on the chugging album closer “Tidy,” which plays like a three-minute-and-fifty-second treatise on the way a slicked up Liz Phair record should sound. Earlier on the album, Eaton touts her girlie clout. With that song, she proves it.

3 stars, out of 5