Milk's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
|
Milkmag.com
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Keith Brammer
June 5, 2000
Leave it to those oh-so-post-modern pop-culture ironists the Dandy Warhols (self-aware rock people that they are) to give us the perfect example of the Classic Rock Fakeout. This works as follows: even though, with the album being on a major label and all, it's a foregone conclusion that the first (and, if you're very lucky, the second and third) songs will be the cream of their (limited) crop (in this case, an odd mixture of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Ride) you, the listener, say Wow! Not sucking yet – cool! And onward you forge, only to be plunged into the valley of Affected Stylistic Rock. Just for the record, "diversity" does not equal "attempting multiple genres whether you're capable of them or not"; the word for that is "dilettante". But what exactly does the remainder of this "fab disc" hold? Bad Stones circa Country Honk (which was their pre-Some Girls nadir, anyway). Bad Stones circa Brown Sugar – actually, it is Brown Sugar, only with different words. Bad Iggy. Bad Tom Petty, for Christ's sake! Roxy Music meets the Cars (worse than bad). Comparisons suck, it's true, but with material this derivative alternatives escape me. "Hipster" lyrics so thoroughly awful that you wish Neal Cassady were around to "Beat" the shit out of them. The only hint of consistency here is in the sheer plasticity of the sound - it's processed beyond any reasonable facsimile of rock music, and although I'm sure they think of themselves as a "real rock band" this negates any claims thereof. There's almost nothing here that has the sound of a real instrument (remember those?) and this renders even an otherwise-pleasant song such as "Sleep" rather painful. What makes this truly depressing, though, is not the fact that this is by no means the worst record I've heard recently, but, rather, that it is the one which most clearly expresses the self-delusion of certain individuals in the music business - namely, those who would claim to love rock music, yet churn out product like this. Ultimately, this is no less calculated or more genuine than any of the prefab kiddie bands everyone loves to hate – it's just aimed at a different (but, one would hope, more aware and less susceptible) audience
|
|
|