Albums by this artist

Welcome To The Monkey House (2003)

Come Down (1997)

The Dandy Warhols

Come Down

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» MARK T.R. DONOHUE | STAFF WRITER

The Dandy Warhols Come Down Capitol, 1997 RiYL: Love and Rockets, Electrafiction, Pulp

So I was riding in my friend Griff's car and he puts on this new CD he'd bought. He's skipping around from song to song, the way you do in the car sometimes, to play me the best songs. I hear one tune with this great, big stupid drumbeat and loads of ba-ba-bas called "Cool As Kim Deal." I dig it. I hear another one with a bunch of whirring synthesizers and a big chorus of background vocals declaring "Everyday Should Be A Holiday." Then he puts on this really funny one about heroin, and I'm sold. My next day at work (I worked at a mall record store in high school), I bought a copy of the CD with my 30% discount. It's called The Dandy Warhols Come Down. I can't wait to hear what the rest of the tracks sound like.

Unfortunately, those three tracks didn't give the whole story. The Dandy Warhols think they're some kind of psychedelic geniuses, bringing new life into a honorable genre with their rock star attitudes and snotty lyrics. They're not. For one thing, no one in this band can play their instrument. Not even a little. The drummer is so terrible that when I played the record for my skinsman, Jimmy B, he actually laughed out loud. The guitarists both play the same three full chords over and over again, and generally not well. The useless piece of cheesecake the singer has recruited to play bass is so talentless she can't even be bothered to learn the real instrument, instead she plays one-finger "key bass."

The reason that the three songs mentioned above manage to carry themselves off? Loads of production. I'm curious as to what the Dandys' pre-major label album sounded like, and how the hell they got signed if it sounds like I imagine it must. This record's producer, Tony Lash, plays keyboards (real, both hands, multiple-finger keyboards) on pretty much every song, which helps cover up that no one in the band proper can manage even one melody. The songs are so drenched in massed harmonies and keyboard textures, the album could almost pass on sound alone. That was, if the songwriting was even halfway decent. Which it isn't.

Besides "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth," which gets old fast, and "Cool As Kim Deal," which doesn't (I'm just a sucker for handclaps, sorry), most of The Dandy Warhols Come Down is absolute bottom-of-the-barrel wannabe psychedelia. The album ends with fourteen minutes of instrumental, two-chord tedium, and opener "Be-In," which features one additional chord, takes nearly seven minutes to establish that, um, being is pretty cool. There's also stuff like "Minnesoter" and "Hard On For Jesus" which tries to be clever but fails miserably, and slower "mood" pieces like "Orange," "Green," and "I Love You," which aren't just boring, they're actually unlistenable.

Based on his production job here, I might be interested in hearing a Tony Lash album sometime. But there's absolutely no way I'm wasting cash on anything by The Dandy Warhols again. I suggest you do the same.

MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.