The one constant during Dressy Bessy’s eight-year career has been their ability to pen great songs for summer afternoons. Everything from the candy-coated retro garage-pop of Pink Hearts Yellow Moons to “Side 2,” the second track off the upcoming Electrified, works best when the grass is green, the sky is blue, and the sun is shining. Over the years, though, Dressy Bessy have been steadily pushing the volume and the distortion up to the point where the Dressy Bessy of 2005 bears little resemblance to the Dressy Bessy of the late 90s.

Sound Go Round was praised upon its release in 2002 for having more bite than Pink Hearts Yellow Moons. While the subject matter hadn’t changed so much (compare and contrast: “Little TV” and “If You Should Try To Kiss Her” versus “Buttercups” and “All These Colors”), the sound was suddenly a lot bigger. Singer Tammy Ealom didn’t sound quite so much like an twelve-year-old girl, and the music didn’t sound like an AM radio recording. But if Pink Hearts Yellow Moons was AM radio and Sound Go Round was FM radio, then 2003’s self-titled album was that giant THX sound that only plays in front of action films screened in theatres the size of football stadiums. Everyone who liked the louder dynamics of Sound Go Round ate up Dressy Bessy, and indeed it was as if the band had managed to make the same quantum leap in sound again, making Sound Go Round sound just as twee, happy-go-lucky and generally innocent as Pink Hearts did a year previous.

On the surface, it seems as though the band has no interest in getting much louder; “Side 2″ would fit in nicely anywhere on Dressy Bessy. Now the game seems to be one of refinement; “Side 2″ keeps up the pace while adding back some of the poppier hooks that took a back seat on the last album. But Dressy Bessy sounds just as summer-friendly as ever, which makes the album’s mid-June release very convenient indeed.