Over the past few years, music websites and everyone that reads them have gotten used to the idea of bedroom pop, the process and practice of bands and artists eschewing traditional recording spaces in favor of DIY techniques in the quiet calm of their personal living space. Somerville duo Mini Dresses have provided a bit of a twist to that, emerging from the shadowy bedroom and setting up shop in their kitchen.
What they’ve cooked up is their Sad Eyes EP, a four-song collection of lo-fi indie pop that will hold us over until their more traditionally recoded debut album is finished. In fact, the songs here, which you can hear below and via their Bandcamp, are extra compositions that did not fit into the framework of the new record.
“Over the past several months, we’ve been recording our first full-length album at our good friend Ian Doerr’s studio in Roxbury,” Mini Dresses’ Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug tell us in an email. “In the midst of this intense, prolific process, we’d written a handful of songs that didn’t quite fit the sound of the record, but we’d grown so attached to them that we felt we couldn’t just leave them to rot in our archive/grave of cast-off songs. With our tiny arsenal of weirdo effects and an apartment kitchen pulling double duty as studio space, we fashioned these would-be Z-sides into the Sad Eyes EP, named after the first song of the collection. We think these songs chart some newer sonic territory for us (different shades of lo-fi, playing around more with production and vocal manipulation), and act as a bridge of sorts between last year’s FOUR and our upcoming album.”
Mini Dresses will be taking a break from recording their debut LP next month, when they play Beat Happening songs at an early-ish Halloween party, October 14 at the Lilypad. The night also features locals trying their hands, faces, and mouths at the music of Ween and Mariah Carey.
