L.A. Weekly's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
|
L.A. Weekly
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Andrew Lentzx
August 25 - 31, 2000
Imagine blending the Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, the Kinks, the Byrds, the Doors and, for that matter, just about every pop touchstone of the last 35 years into a seamless composite, and you have something akin to the Dandy Warhols, the smartest backward-gazing band in the world. That’s a tall order even for a self-consciously retro project, but these slacker-fabulous Portlandians wear their ’60s/’70s-radio influences as comfortably as those cherry vintage threads they score in each town along their tours.
The dull heat of spaghetti-Western trumpets in the lead single, “Godless,” sets the tone for Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, a quiveringly cinematic album larger than the sum of its psychedelic Brit Invasion parts: Guitars jangle and get strummed, drums lope and gallop lazily, while sweet organ harmonies bathe this welter of pop-culture signifiers in golden smog. Strutting Jagger-lipped and chisel-featured, Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Pete Holmström are as cocky as any self-respecting next-big-things oughta be: “I feel cool as shit cuz I got no thoughts keeping me down” (“Solid”); or cruel, with the taunt to an aging sexpot in “Horse Pills”: “He’s a Spanish fly/that bucks like a Stallion . . . butt’s getting bigger, do you think he’ll notice maybe?/That’s okay, don’t worry ’bout it, baby”), both rapped Beckishly in sleepy voices with morning cigs. Flouting the rule that no pop song should be more than five minutes long, “Mohammed,” “Nietzsche” and the angels’-choir “Sleep” actually glisten more the longer they smolder. And thanks to foxy keyboardist Zia McCabe’s synth whimsy, you can see why all those ex-Elastica and -Blur fans across the pond are digging so hard on these thrift-store fops.
There isn’t the slightest pause between any of the tracks on Thirteen Tales, just one big schmeer of good-rockin’ vibes cresting and troughing for the length of this ode to, well, hipness. Which sounds a tad gross, but dig this lyric from “Bohemian Like You”: “So what do you do?/Oh, yeah, I wait tables, too/No, I haven’t heard your band/because you guys are kinda new.” See? Coolness doesn’t have to mean coldness.
|
|
|