The Music Monitors Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
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The Music Monitor
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by David W. Jackson
September 2000
Ask most people their opinion of the Dandy Warhols, and those who don't go "who?" are likely to respond, "Aren't they that 120 Minutes band?" Truly, their "hit," "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth" from the last album, Dandy Warhols Come Down, seemed to exist only as a fabrication of the marketing savvy surrounding them (back a couple of pre-merger years agowhen labels used to fight over who got to keep bands rather than who had to cover bands' debts from previous astronomical contracts), and some would say it was this sort of blatant commercialism that sounded the final death knell for challenging, inventive music (or really, any music at all) on MTV. Some would also say that a great band like the Dandys can get lost in the hype, and I'd agree with them. Even the Dandys themselves, no doubt angered and bewildered by their contract-holders' new-plastic ideas, stirred up/egged on contraversial tales of gun-waving rivalry and gangland style sabatoge between themselves and (not acknowledged) old friends the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
So now Sassy and Details are down the tubes, Limp Korn Def Bizkit white-boy-rage is all the, uh, rage, and the Dandys have long since been revealed as hapless pawns in a throat-cramming scheme gone horribly awry. And that's what makes Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia so lovingly, re-freshingly out of step with the world. Still gazing at those shoes, the Dandys now occasionally look up (and further back) with psych-folk and country vibes, tongue-further-in-cheek attitude, and the "I don't hear a single" uniformity of design that record execs love to hate. Check out "Bohemian Like You" or "Horse Pills" for about 30 seconds each if you don't believe the Dandys are legit, despite their poster boys-and-girl appearance. In a different time, this record would have been as huge as the last one really was; now that everything's gone at Durst, though, this one's likely to slip through the commercial cracks the way great records usually do.
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