On Rockmaker, The Dandy Warhols’ vista is one of absolutes.
It’s a strategy as old as time: create that one killer single and let it pull your more nuanced, complicated album blinking through into the mainstream daylight.
For The Dandy Warhols, their 2000 release Thirteen Tales From Bohemia was by their standards not entirely lacking in commercial potential, but on it lurked Bohemian Like You, a song that owed as much to glam as it did to their residual Portland indie cool.
Not the first masterpiece to fail and then be revived by its use in a commercial, it would eventually make The Dandy Warhols unlikely chart trailblazers in 2001, but much like those who’d dived deeper into the New Radicals post the success of You Get What You Give, the coffee table CD crowd found themselves quickly retrenching to Dido and The Lighthouse Family as a means of relief from The Dandy Warhols’ otherwise banger-free collection.
Led by the in-real-life bon viveur Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the band quickly grew bored of a major label existence they were never suited to, and 2005’s Odditorium Or Warlords of Mars was, they later admitted, calculatedly designed to get them dropped – and it worked.
Now allowed the sort of creative freedom which was as necessary to them as it was essential, a stacatto release schedule was last updated four years ago by Tafelmuzik Means More When You’re Alone, a three-and-a-half-hour long odyssey of critic baiting randomness which featured a trio of pieces each over half-an-hour long.
Rockmaker finds Taylor-Taylor sanguine about the scope of his role in 21st century culture, freely admitting that now, ‘Musicians aren’t important. You’ve got superstars…and then you’ve got everybody else’.
Pushing back against the outside world’s meta (collaborations, poptimism, reinvention) The Dandy Warhols’ 12th album is a down and dirty rock record, the sound of musicians building a new-old construct out of matured excess and hedonism. This time at least, nobody can accuse them of exploring something that they’re not familiar with.
By any standard, let’s agree that the moment for subtley passed a long while ago, hence the puckish feel of Alcohol and Cocainemarijuananicotine, a sleazy electroclash number that celebrates the undeniable links between making art and getting very, very high.
Rockmaker’s vista is one of absolutes; an America going to hell in a drugsbasket, The Summer Of Hate scratching an itch for punk rock whilst railing against a hot season of mindless violence in their home city.
Opener Doomsday Bells, meanwhile, beckons on the inevitable, industrial mendacity a la Trent Reznor, whilst Danzig With Myself, which features Pixies’ Black Francis, rails groovily against those who don’t understand the difference between voting for democracy or for someone who will end it.
There’s a certain suspension of prejudice required here though to believe that the nastiness isn’t simply another pretentious ruse got out of hand.
It’s an impression underlined by the goofy post-grunge of I’d Like To Help You With Your Problem, a tune which even Slash can’t save, whilst Root Of All Evil comes over like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers at their banal worst.
For the most part however, it sounds like The Dandy Warhols mean it on The Cross and Love Thyself, whilst closer grandiose pinao led closer I Will Never Stop Loving You proves that it’s almost impossible to make anything less than perfect when Debbie Harry is somewhere nearby.
A lot of the people who’ve long since charity-shopped their copy of Thirteen Tales From Bohemia are now probably complaining about pavement dogshit and self service tills.
That record wasn’t for them and Rockmaker isn’t either, but if anyone out there is still listening they’ll find that The Dandy Warhols’ own little corner of dystopia has never sounded more ready to party.
