The Globes Welcome To The Monkey House review (4 stars out of 4)
The Globe And Mail (Toronto)
Welcome To The Monkey House
by Robert Everett-Green
August 21, 2003

The emotional distance between caring and not caring can be very small, as anyone knows who has felt the subtle extinction of whatever it is that sustains a relationship. In pop, caring and not caring are also modes of rhetoric, which means that even a shallow-seeming song can offer deep metaphoric play between degrees of commitment in performance and in life.

Take a song like We Used to Be Friends , from the excellent new disc by The Dandy Warhols. It's about a wisp of affection caught somewhere between memory and oblivion. Does it even exist, this feeling that Courtney Taylor-Taylor sings about so languidly? His voice says maybe not, but the music behind him says yes, because you can't listen to that lifting emphatic beat and those candied, rubbery sounds and not believe that this simulation of a hazy past sensation is real.

Or listen to Plan A , in which the will to care about something comically outstrips Taylor-Taylor's ability (as chief writer and pose-maker) to determine what that should be. "There must be some kind of message," he sings in a hooting tenor that might have been imported from a Renaissance consort. "Simple but somehow impressive / Anyone who can think of something / come on now, just express it." There's nothing to say, but the Warhols know just how to say it, working up a massive choral dance groove that's impossible to resist.

Noticing how rhetoric falls away from experience became a hobby for the cleverati during the nineties, and the Warhols have learned their lessons well. The advantage they have over some other players of the game (Dave Eggers, for example) is that they know how to dance, and to make you dance with them.

I Am a Scientist is a pure dance groove, assisted in performance by Nile Rodgers of the seminal disco band Chic, and by David Bowie in composition. It's also an irrational hymn to rational thought. "Yeah, uh, I am a scientist, we gotta live by science alone," Taylor-Taylor intones sounding absurd and sexy at the same time.

There are no weak songs on this album, and several dangerously compulsive ones. The arrangements are ultra-smart and almost impossibly tasty. They're like electric ice-cream, and you gobble them down like a glutton. Some credit must go to Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), who co-produced with Taylor-Taylor; to Russell Elevado, who contributed to the arrangements; and to the other members of this very hip group from Portland, Oregon: Peter Loew (guitars), Zia McCabe (keyboards and bass), and Brent DeBoer (drums and backing vocals).