U.S. Music Vault's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review (8 stars out of 10)
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U.S Music Vault
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Matt Portenoy
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Anyone who has ever, in one sitting, listened to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety knows what a musical journey is. From the very first, brassy strains of the title track to the last, jarring reverberations of Paul McCartney's looped voice in "A Day in the Life," the lads from Liverpool managed to successfully recreate a kind musical experience which had been lying dormant in popular culture since the days of Beethoven and Bach. When one puts on Sgt. Pepper's..., you start somewhere, trek through the orgasmic peaks of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and the lilting valleys of "She's Leaving Home" and end up in a different, more enlightened place than you were before. Many other artists have experimented with the art of the "musical journey" (which is often marked by a lack of spacing between individual tracks) since the Fab Four brought it back into the mainstream in 1967: Jimi Hendrix had his monumental Electric Ladyland, Pink Floyd had their Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, and, more recently, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) had his stunning The Fragile. Now, in the year 2000, art-rock outfit The Dandy Warhols have taken a stab at creating a sonic journey with thirteen tales from urban bohemia, their most vibrant and eclectic record yet. Unfortunately, this album isn't the next Sgt. Pepper's..., or even the next The Fragile, but it's a damn fine collection of spicy pop treasures that will send you into musical ecstasy.
The Dandy Warhols are, at heart, brazenly experimental, and thus they follow in the path of many other niche artists (John Osjazca, John Brion, etc.) and incorporate a wide variety of sounds and instruments into their poppy confections. Their songs are like melodic stews, with a little of this and that thrown in here and there in order to kick things up a notch. "Godless", the opening number, combines a simple acoustic strumming pattern with a little bit of guitar fuzz and a whole lot of jazz trumpet, creating a warm melody perfect for coffee houses or East Village restaurants. "Mohammed" takes a keyboard/guitar riff and throws in middle eastern drums and chants to give it a feel far more organic than Madonna's recent experiments with these same elements on Ray of Light. "Sleep" uses a sampled drum beat to back up a quiet duet between a steel stringed guitar and an upright bass. The varying musical elements in each track serves to give thirteen tales from urban bohemia an unpredictable, nuanced feel, making the album far more exciting.
The best thing about this record, however, is lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor's hilarious, sardonic, and subtly brilliant lyrics. Taylor takes a risk on this record by choosing both to both celebrate and mock the alternative scene The Dandy Warhols are such an indelible part of, yet the gutsiness pays off wonderfully. It's hard to quote individual song lyrics from this disc: each lyric is so well-written, so inexorably tied to every other lyric in the song that it's near impossible to pick and choose. The most humorous track on the album is "Bohemian Like You," in which two alternative types revel in their own edginess (so what do you do?/oh yeah, I wait tables too/no I haven't heard your band/because you guys are pretty new/but if you dig vegan food/well, come over to my work/I'll have them cook you something natural). "Horse Pills" is a lacerating, satirical number about aging, upper class women and their gold-digging, studmuffin younger boy-toys. "The Gospel," the album's final song, is much more sincere, however, as Taylor balances individual truth with a haunting refrain from the classic "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
The disc's problems lie in it's "musical journey" aspect, as it is too manic and unfocused to take us steadily from point A to point B. Certain songs seem out of place and out of tune with the direction in which the work is trying to move (see "Country Leaver," the lone twang fueled, country-rock number). At other points, the album seems to have worked past its climax, past its denouement, and straight to its ultimate conclusion (for example, when the energetic "Get Off" leads into the quiet "Sleep"), yet it keeps on moving forward, beautifully but aimlessly. Ultimately, therefore, this record isn't a neoclassic journey for a new century, but who really cares about the beginning and end of a bumpy trek when the ride itself is so good?
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