ManchesterOnline's Welcome To The Monkey House review (3 out of 5 stars)
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ManchesterOnline.co.uk
Welcome To The Monkey House
by Ian Hepburn
June 2003
In all honesty, the Dandy Warhols have been one of those bands I’ve never managed to get. Not really. I can listen to their music and enjoy it, but there’s just some indefinable quality about them that makes becoming a die-hard fan just on the wrong side of impossible.
For some reason, they remind me of an acid-rocked up version of Bis. God knows why, but they do.
The ubiquity of their last album, and in particular the Bohemian Like You single which ended up everywhere from Vodafone ads to soundtracking Alan Green on 606, put them into a plane where greater things than their usual indie-with-kudos were expected. Welcome to the Monkey House is the first album to come in this new post-fame and fortune Dandy’s era.
Drawing its name from the work of Kurt Vonnegut, it’s a fine, if forgettable, chunk of indie by numbers. Lots of nice guitar, vaguely ironic vocals varying from growl to falsetto and absolutely nothing to distinguish it from a billion and one other albums out there.
I Am A Scientist, with its low-fi thunderings, and the hypnotic The Dope both stand out as the lead tracks on Welcome to the Monkey House, but all lack the catchy hook of the worldwide mega hit and global irritant that was Bohemian Like You.
It’ll likely shift by the wheelbarrow load and guarantee them another thousand advertising contracts, but Welcome to the Monkey House comes across as the perfect aural wallpaper. Nice in the background, but nothing too obtrusive or noticeable.
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