Madcap Music's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review

Madcapmusic.com
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
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"This is the riff police. Drop your guitars and come out with your picks up."

STYLE: Ripped riffs
RIFFERENCE LIBRARY
60s: Rolling Stones
70s: Lou Reed , T. Rex, David Bowie
80s: Love and Rockets
90s: Catherine Wheel

Great. Another disposable, overhyped, completely unnecessary rock band. In lieu of wasting actual effort to construct sentences, here’s a quick and dirty synopsis of why this record is a drag:

The Dandy Warhols is a supremely dumb band name.
The album title is equally dumb.
The album cover is a graphic artist’s worst nightmare.
The lead singer’s name is Courtney Taylor-Taylor. Even if it is a real name, it reeks of pretentiousness.
There are blatantly stolen riffs all over the record. Stones, Bowie, Reed, Beatles, Clapton—you name it, they take for their own. There’s even a cop on a riff Elastica copped from Wire ("Bohemian Like You"). That’s a double cop!
It masks its lack of innovation with big-budget production and sound effects. Capitol Records, we are not fooled.
They start the record with three straight songs clocking in at 5:22, 5:20, and 5:40, respectively. Songs that are way too uneventful (not to mention unoriginal) to start off a record, let alone merit 16-plus minutes of your time. To add insult to injury, the song titles are as follows: "Godless," "Mohammed," and "Nietzsche." I only wish the songs rose to the grandiosity promised by their titles. Any minutely inspired moments are ruined by point #5. Adding aggravation to the insult that was added to the injury, Taylor-squared mistakenly thinks he’s Marc Bolan (or Daniel Ash of Love & Rockets circa "So Alive").
FYI: As a rule of thumb, any of the songs on the record logging in at over four minutes can be skipped outright. That means six of the 13 songs or 32 of the 59 minutes. Not a stellar "track" record.
Following the songs mentioned in point #7 is "Country Leaver," an attempt at a blues-country number in the "Country Honk" vein (Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed, 1969). I am duly (yawwwwn) impressed. I say, come up with a few decent albums first. Then we’ll let you goof off on company time.
"Sleep" is the only song that seems to deliver what it promises. Veddy, veddy bad news for anyone buying the record.
What beats all is that this band actually has some true talent, but it gets buried underneath shovelfuls of bad decisions. "Horse Pills" is a grungy rocker that I can live with and even get into on occasion. "Get Off" also doesn’t set off the shit detector. Pretty catchy stuff. (Both songs are under 3½ minutes, by the way.) The shorter the song, the better they seem to get.
Next, please.

Song Highlights
"Horse Pills"
"Get Off"

Letter Grade: C

Fun Fact: Eric Matthews lends some nice horn work to a couple tracks. I knew they sounded too good to be true. Anton Newcombe of fellow riffivalists the Brian Jonestown Massacre also plays on the record. Birds of a feather riff together.