The Dandy Warhols
Beat The World Records
(2008)
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Nobody can ever accuse the tragically hip Dandy Warhols of not knowing how to have a good time. The band’s most recent offering, Earth To The Dandy Warhols — its first concept album since Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (Capitol, 2000) and its debut since having left Capitol Records to form label Beat The World — is part pleasure, part mind-fuck. While I am at a loss as to why it is that concept albums allow The Dandy Warhols to break out of its smug albeit talented cage of music, Earth to the Dandy Warhols is, regardless of my speculation, a breath of fresh air in the increasingly crowded indie-pop scene. To some extent shaking off the band’s Velvet Underground-inspired roots, Earth To The Dandy Warhols gives the allusion of letting everything go wild while in fact being an incredibly compact, flawlessly tight yet simultaneously sprawling album.

Never ones to shy away from the strange, The Dandy Warhols use their love of moody rock symphonies with a side of synth to make an album centering around the theme of outer space. However, just because the work happens to take place out of this world does not mean The Dandy Warhols won’t use every opportunity in the album to comment back on the world and the society they so love to hate. In “Welcome to the 3rd World,” a song you can imagine hearing in the background of a rocking college party (if only most college students had good enough taste to appreciate such bands), Courtney Taylor-Taylor and company sing eyebrow-raising lines such as “Your lips match my wallet” followed by a mocking chorus of “The boys like the girls and the girls like the money…. The girls like the boys and the boys like the honey.” Meanwhile, fans of The Dandy Warhols’ Welcome to the Monkey House (Capitol, 2003) will enjoy such psychedelic gems as “Wasp in the Lotus” and “And Then I Dreamt of Yes,” where hypnotic-cool lyrics rub elbows brilliantly with the synth-rock, hand-claps, and bells provided by Brent De Boer (drums), Peter Holmstrom (guitars), and Zia McCabe (bass). In “Wasp in the Lotus,” Taylor-Taylor’s melodic lyrics clash with the harsh riffs of the guitar, unexpectedly amplifying the pleasure of the song… bestowing the listener with a musical example of the phrase “so good it hurts.” This hurts, but dammit we just can’t stop listening.

Perhaps therein lies the genius of The Dandy Warhols. These four musicians are able to make their fans shake their heads in self-loathing while simultaneously shaking their booties in celebration. While such awkward dichotomy is key to the humor of many of today’s beloved television comedies (The Office, Arrested Development), it should be noted that The Dandy Warhols have been doing this since 1995– way before it was cool and right when it was annoying. The band members know they are assholes: they just don’t care. And you can’t help but love guys like that… or at the very least, admire them.

Even as one of the songs in Earth To The Dandy Warhols called “Jenny Yum Yum,” repeats the absurd phrase “yum yum” for the duration of the track, it is still saved by the orchestral talent of the band. Thus, as much as we want to hate The Dandy Warhols for creating an album that is so thematically silly, we cannot help but give the album a repeated listen and grudgingly, and eventually grinningly, accept the band’s genius. The Dandy Warhols have made an art both musically and lyrically out of giving their audience the middle finger.

While it has become expected of The Dandy Warhols to use their music as both a mockery and a celebration of pop culture and pop music, I cannot help but wonder if, as the album title suggests, Earth to the Dandy Warhols is not just a send-up of the planet Earth, but of The Dandy Warhols themselves. Points for chutzpah, guys.

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