Trouser Presses Dandys Rule, OK review
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trouserpress.com
Dandys Rule, OK
by Ira Robbins
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The umpty-millionth band of tragically self-conscious style-mongers to come sashaying down the noise-pop runway as if they had just bought the place hails from Portland, Oregon. The Dandy Warhols have a regrettable name and a modern time-capsule sound that neatly summarizes a good chunk of what had stopped by MTV's Alternative Nation sporting an English accent in the previous two weeks. On its first album, the quartet is both seriously pretentious — with glib put-on lyrics about LSD, suicide and TV, aren't-we-clever rock references and the accurately clocked interplanetary monotony of "It's a Fast-Driving Rave-Up With the Dandy Warhols Sixteen Minutes" — and pretentiously unserious, as in a funny parody entitled "(Tony, This Song Is Called) Lou Weed" and a pointless nothing called "Grunge Betty." To their credit, the Dandy Warhols are commendably good at teasing a variety of cool sounds from Courtney Taylor's vocal harmonies with keyboard bassist Zia McCabe and his fuzzbox clashes with the band's other guitarist, Peter Holmstrom. But cleverness is no substitute for real songwriting, and that's where the fizz goes out here. Having located the point where the self-amused genre fakery of bands like Denim and the Pooh Sticks becomes hard to distinguish from the sham posturing of phonies like Suede or Menswe@r, the Dandy Warhols — lacking the stylistic commitment to be a full-time anything — use it as a safety zone in which everything is possible but nothing really matters.
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