Disclaimer Music Review Archive's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
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Disclaimer Music Review Archive
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Chris Willie Williams
Originally appeared at http://www.disclaimerband.com/d.html#dandywarhols
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You have to get ten tracks into the Dandy Warhols' Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia until you hit a song that fully lives up to its- and the band's- potential: "Bohemian Like You." The song is a joyously fuzzy glam rock number with a chorus that's as heavenly and perfect (punctuated with an ecstatic "Woo!") as the similarly awesome verses require to make a truly great song. Too often, the Warhols' other songs ("Godless," "Mohammed," et al) forget the importance of a chorus, following up terrifically melodic verses with lengthy instrumental bits that don't really go anywhere special. The way the music scene is at the moment, though, maybe we should be grateful for bands that even manage to get their verses right, and the Warhols definitely do that. Courtney Taylor has a million different singing voices, resembling, by turns, Elliott Smith, Beck, Thom Yorke, and Smash Mouth's Steve Harwell, and the band effectively locates musical moods as multifaceted as his larynx. "Nietzsche" is inspired dreampop, "Get Off" is infectious Britpop (made all the more impressive by the fact that the Warhols are from Portland), and "Sleep" is a successful approximation of Pink Floyd's melancholy acoustic numbers, etc. As I said, "Bohemian Like You" is the only song on here that's utterly perfect; some are overlong, some are underwritten, and a couple ("Horse Pills" in particular) are just annoying. However, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia nevertheless displays more songwriting smarts in 56 minutes than most bands display in 20 years' worth of material. Grade: B+
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