Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia

by

The Dandy Warhols

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The Dandy Warhols are one cheeky band. Amidst today's one-hit-wonder pop music scene, where buzzbin bands go from being the second coming to yesterday's news practically overnight (a fate that The Dandy Warhols narrowly escaped with their 1997 hit 'Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth'), the band decided to make "one last classic album" in the tradition of the great albums of the late sixties and early seventies, where the entire recording is remembered more than the one or two hit singles it may spawn. That's an audacious thing to do (after all, the music biz is all about pushing singles), but for real music fans, it's a godsend, and the resulting product, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, is one of the most enjoyable albums of the year, and definitely the most fun.

Guitarist/vocalist/producer Courtney Taylor-Taylor and his crew plundered the classic rock vaults to create a wildly eclectic album. Notable styles that were 'lifted' are Burt Bacharach ('Godless'), The Beatles ('Mohammed'), Led Zeppelin III ('Country Leaver'), The Byrds ('Cool Scene'), Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground ('Shakin''), Gram Parsons ('The Gospel') and Buffalo Springfield ('Big Indian'). Some people have also noted the sly irony in the song 'Godless', which borrows the intro to George Harrison's 'My Sweet Lord'. The classic album sound is also mimicked to perfection, with a warm, bass-heavy sound, luscious guitar overdubs, beautiful vocal harmonies, and as a final kicker, cross-fades between songs to give 13 Tales a continuous feel.

Taylor-Taylor's chameleonlike voice is the real star here. One minute he's delivering the vocals in a whisper-like tone, the next he's evoking Lou Reed while doing an eighties-style rap, then he's sounding like Iggy Pop, then he's harmonizing like the White Album-era Beatles, and as a final coup de grace, he sings the country-style album closer 'The Gospel' in a voice that sounds amazingly close to Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

Every song on the album is loads of fun, especially 'Country Leaver', 'Solid', 'Horse Pills', 'Cool Scene', and 'Shakin'', but the real great song (and ironically, potential huge single) is the sardonic 'Bohemian Like You'. Not since Jarvis Cocker's legendary class-war diatribes 'Common People' and 'Sorted For E's & Wizz' has anyone so hilariously lampooned wannabe hipsters. Over a guitar riff blatantly stolen from The Rolling Stones' 'Brown Sugar', Taylor-Taylor sings, "so what do you do?/oh yeah I wait tables too/no I haven't heard your band/cause you guys are pretty new" before launching into a (yet again) Stones-like "woo-hoo!" chorus. Irresistable!

People will probably overemphasize Taylor-Taylor's social commentary, but that's just prevalent in one song. As for the rest of the songs on 13 Tales, there's a reason the lyrics weren't included with the cd; as Taylor-Taylor sings in 'Cool Scene', "I really don't care what I sing/and I really doubt you know what I mean." Hey, forget about finding witty bon mots in the songs, sit back, and have a blast listening to this fabulous album.

Here's the breakdown of the Dandy Warhols third release, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia: six glammy rockers, five drones, two country/blues numbers. The glam is glammier (they rock with authoritay!), the drones dronier and more sinuous, and the country/blues new experiments that shouldn't be held against them. All in all, their best by miles. Their decadence no longer has the feel of a pose - they've been in Hollywood long enough to have the real stink of the high-life/low-life on them. They screw older women for money ("Horse Pills"), they empty their minds of everything but their own fabulous selves ("Solid"), they spend a lot of time trying to get off (uh, "Get Off"). When they aren't busy with high times and easy sex, they obsess over living in a godless society (uh, "Godless") while expressing the desire to have a "God that stays dead/not plays dead" ("Nietzsche", very funny). They're confused and proud of it. In the end, they're exactly what they want to be: "Bohemian Like You".