The Dandy Warhols
...Come Down

To record an album, several things are necessary beyond just a record deal and the sheer luck of having managed to sign that contract with a major like Capitol. Perhaps our Dandies from Portland, Oregon thought they could get by with a catchy single like "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth", perhaps they hoped that single would grant them immortality and everlasting fame. Too bad for them, it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

The latest album, "Odditorium Or Warlords From Mars" released almost two years ago, represents an embarrassing mix of pseudo-psychedelia, country, and simple, bland dance-pop... the one before it, the only slightly more entertaining "Welcome To The Monkey House", toyed with house, disco, and funk, achieving some level of sheer catchiness at the very least. Looking closely, their most cohesive work seems to be "Thirteen Stories From Urban Bohemia", released way back in 2000, an album tinged with strong country, folk, and psychedelic influences that at times indulged in a somewhat sterile minimalism devoid of ideas. So what have these four brazen-faced lads achieved in their career? Apart from posing as a neo-Velvet Underground alternative band, obsessively citing the '60s, and chasing fashion without ever catching it? Nothing. That’s all they’ve done.

And how might we judge, within such a debacle, this "The Dandy Warhols Come Down"? An uncertain and inferior concoction that indiscriminately absorbs pop, ambient, folk, psychedelia, grunge, brit pop and whatever else you can think of. On closer inspection, the one who truly stands out for the entire duration of this monotonous hodgepodge of styles is producer Tony Lash, who can be deemed the sole architect of the almost ridiculous turmoil of effects-laden keyboards and guitars that envelop the album. The Dandies (Courtney Taylor-Taylor on vocals, Zia McCabe on keyboards and bass, Eric Hedford on drums, and Peter Holmstrom on guitar plus the aforementioned Tony Lash on keyboards and percussion) indeed immersed the songs in a climate of a perennial and inextricable trance, a sort of fog induced by some concoction of hallucinogens, marijuana, and heroin... Sure, they'd love to come across as the Grateful Dead, relentless drug users who nevertheless managed to create art. Guys, too much presumption... They did get some tricks right.

They start off strong with "Be-In", a seven-minute monster that mixes the arrogant cadences of hard rock with an unsettling guitar melody and an indecipherable pastiche of distortions and keyboards leading to a mantra-like chorus that's nearly hypnotizing. They don’t do too badly with "Boys Better", where the Dandies kind of redo Oasis, do the math... The chorus, however, is nice, catchy, full of brazenness, the guitars at full blast make their mark and McCabe's little organ seems just right... And then what do we have? A psychedelic country-rock, of course, what else? We're talking about "Minnesoter", ironic and parodic, but nothing more. From this point on the album is in free fall: to the hypnotic, surreal, half Radiohead-half Pink Floyd "Orange", they juxtapose the pointless distorted mantra of "I Love You"; they mix brit pop and surf nonchalantly and pull a rabbit out of the hat (i.e., perform a miracle without even knowing how) with the aforementioned "Not If You Were...". Not satisfied, the guys make room for a carefree and optimistic techno-rock like "Everyday Should Be A Holiday". Sure, it's pleasant and catchy, but the song feels like a replay of "Legs" by ZZ Top. What's left are "Whipping Tree" and "Pete International Airport", ambient-psychedelic sketches halfway between evocative and soporific, the gloomy Nirvana-like "Hard On For Jesus", and the instrumental conclusion tinged with dance, psychedelia, and techno of "The Creep Out", an instrumental orgy that chooses the "prog" duration path for its own sake.

Listening to this album is a real odyssey, and the sirens of boredom and impatience are always lurking. An album frankly disconcerting in its scatterbrained nature and its lack of ideas cleverly buried in a chilly and mysterious layer of keyboards and guitar effects where none of the members manage to shine. It's pointless to keep listening to this band, as everything they've uttered is incomprehensible... and I really want to hear what they'll do in the next album. Obviously, that's if Capitol doesn't listen to the band's entire discography and makes the only possible decision at that point: to force the guys to stop making "music" once and for all.