The Dandy Warhols Earth to the Dandy Warhols by: Thomas Mendelovits Fri:08-Aug-08 Label: Capitol Year: 2008 WB rating 72 out of 100

Who woulda thunk it? Eight albums into their career as modern psychedelia’s most over/under-appreciated group, The Dandy Warhols return to form with an album taking their distancing ploys and ironic gesturing to new heights. Questions of whether or not you like, or even ‘get’, music as piss-take aside, the Dandies at least show a lot of pizzazz across Earth to the Dandy Warhol’s 13 tracks. In the words of William Blake: “exuberance is beauty”. It is this quality that has always marked The Dandy Warhols’ successes. Indeed, amazingly for a band that walks the jaded-line more than most, it is this vivacious aspect that makes Earth a fairly consistently entertaining pose. Compared to recent lacklustre efforts from Beck and The Shortwave Set, The Dandy Warhols are awake to the challenge of being a musical smarty-pants.

It’s a triumph in itself that the Dandy Warhols manage to find this much sass so far into their career. Where many debuts suffer from a crisis of faith in deciding between outright referencing, nuanced borrowing, and often-wayward attempts at innovation, The Dandies are too cocky a bunch to ever suffer that affliction. While the kind of singularly catchy pop of their heyday has waned somewhat, the band still have a knack for the hooks, silly (yet kinda smart) choruses and driving rhythms that make such music fun. There’s a lot of their typical sound here; opener ‘The World the People Together (Come On)’ and ‘Wasp in the Lotus’ have signature Courtney Taylor-Taylor cracking riffs, but elsewhere the band reference the olds. ‘Talk Radio’ is a shameless riff on the Aussie classic ‘The Real Thing’, ‘Welcome to the Third World’ screams Talking Heads post-disco, ‘Love Song’ is wide-eyed West Coast psych-pop. Despite this, everything throughout Earth is done with enough self-assurance to be pulled off marginally convincingly.

Taylor-Taylor has never been the most accessible of front men and Earth blazes what must be a new record for song-writing as personality obfuscation. Growing old was always going to be hard for the man who sang “never thought you’d be a junkie” to one of his former friends, but on Earth, Taylor-Taylor refreshingly finds new creative lease in suiting up as former musical personalities. You can almost pick and choose, his stylings are that transparent: ‘Welcome to the Third World’ is David Byrne by numbers, ‘And Then I Dreamt of Yes’, in title and tone, recalls Grandaddy, while ‘Mission Control’ is equal parts B-52s and Marilyn Manson. Like the music, in amongst all these adopted personas, it seems that when unveiled, he may be including himself in the front man pantheon, seemingly parodying himself. And why not: he has penned a couple of certified classics, after all. Indeed, unlike other acts yet to establish themselves, The Dandies are a proved proposition – they get away with this sort of stuff. The trick is to do it with consistent verve. For The Dandy Warhols, never a band for earnestness anyway, going retro is one way they do this.

If this all sounds a bit ghastly, the lyrics are rather funny and somehow (for music this retro) manage to explode a few ‘this is now!’ light bulbs. On ‘Mission Control’, Taylor-Taylor stabs again at those he lampooned on ‘Bohemian Like You’: “19 years old/you better not listen to yourself anymore/the communist calling doesn’t mean anything anymore”, while the yelped lyric of ‘Welcome to the Third World’ matches its disco hedonism: “Hey girl, you dance pretty good for an almost white girl/and mmm, mmm, your lipstick sure do match my wallet”. Surely a sentiment as relevant in today’s scenester circles as it was in the 70s.

It is a statement of contemporary appreciation that this record and something like local space-psych outfit The Sand Pebbles’ Ceduna can come out at around the same time. It’s 2008; 40 years since the delay pedal freak-out made its debut, 40 years of a lot of stuff happening in between. And yet, as ‘psychedelic’ as Earth and Ceduna are, these two records reflect something because, just as they both rely on old tropes (drawn-out motifs and carefully built-up repetition) for their sonic foundation, so too do they completely diverge in intent and function. On the one hand, The Sand Pebbles create beautiful, atmospheric and expansive jams without a trace of irony or retro posturing. On the other hand, The Dandy Warhols are a pop band at heart, albeit a fucked up one who take post-modern disingenuousness as a starting point. Hardly revelatory or groundbreaking, Earth to the Dandy Warhols at least entertains in the creation of sharply referential and often sound-bite filled, but mostly rollicking rock n’ roll.