Psychological Enema's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia review
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Toobs.com
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
by Darren Delmore
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After you get through the three-part acoustic landscape at the beginning of the Dandy Warhols' new album 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia, you don't expect to hear the odd folky, slide guitar-driven "Country Leaver" with the purposely bad vocal and lyrics of going back to Amsterdam. And then, when you think maybe they were just trying something new and would surely come back to the spacey terrain of the first three songs, "Solid" - a blatant Lou Reed impersonation follows. Then "Horse Pills", with a hip-hop style vocal about a Hollywood has-been chick who gets millions in a divorce and pays a Latino to have sex with her. But then you start to get it; The Dandy Warhols are as diverse musically as they allegedly are in sexuality and drug preference. But rarely do I get a CD from a current band I'd never heard of and be able to listen to it 30 times in a row, like I did with this album. 30 TIMES IN A ROW. The only album I can think of that remotely compared in back-to-back initial listenings was Pavement's Terror Twilight. "Bohemian Like You" rips off chords used more familiarly by The Rolling Stones and Ted Nugent in the pro-Vegan mock anthem that's catchier than syphilis in a Turkish Bathhouse. "Shakin'" another song being released as a single aside from "Bohemian…", is an outright David Bowie imitation. The final two songs veer back to the acoustic, fading out with "The Gospel", which, opposed to most of the album, sounds original. But the irony about the Dandy Warhols is that, yes, they're completely imitating and ripping off so many obvious rock legends, but it still sounds good, and they manage to do it with their own style. But from the photos I've seen of them, maybe they've probably done enough cocaine to convince themselves that they actually are the Velvet Underground, but reincarnated.
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