| |
|
|
NO HEAVEN AT THE PARADISE
|
|
|
|
|
|
As a studio band, the Dandy Warhols, a wry foursome from Portland, Oregon, have been through some major changes since they emerged eight years ago sounding like a smart and scruffy Velvet Underground–influenced indie-rock outfit on their first CD, Dandys Rule OK? (Tim/Kerr). The rough melodic edge has been sanded down; the loosely strummed guitars have been tightened up. Their new Welcome to the Monkey House (Capitol) even finds them doing a true-to-life imitation of ’80s new wave with the help of two former members of Duran Duran, Simon LeBon and Nick Rhodes. On stage, however, they haven’t changed much at all. Sure, there are minor differences between the line-up that hit the Paradise a week ago Wednesday and the one that came around opening for Spiritualized in the late ’80s. The drummer has a lot more hair — an afro, really. And they can now sell out a room the size of the Paradise, so they don’t have to worry about trying to squeeze as many of their favorite tunes into a 30- or 40- minute opening set. They can forgo having an opening band and spend the bulk of the first half-hour of their set trying to find an elusive neo-psychedelic groove. They can even, within reason, spend as much time as they like on stage. So when the sign outside the Paradise warned that the Dandys had booked themselves from 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., I was a little concerned: they don’t have that many great songs. And when it was approaching only 10 p.m. and they’d already played almost all of their best material, I began feeling claustrophobic, with panic not too far off. I mean, an hour and a half of the Dandy Warhols should be enough to send any reasonable fan home happy. Right? If Dandys frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor — or any other member of the foursome, who’d brought along a trumpet player to add color to every third or fourth song — had any interest in sending people home happy, he wasn’t going to show it. The sharp new-wave edges of Welcome to the Monkey House were mostly ignored by the band in favor of a psychedelicized, mushy, strum-and-drone take on the sound of their first album. If anything, it seemed that Taylor-Taylor and his crew were intent on bringing back the so-called shoegazer æsthetic that was popular among British bands in the late ’80s and early ’90s, in what appeared to be England’s answer to Amerindie pop. That is, they spent most of the show looking at their shoes, or the floor, or something they might have all spilled on their shirts. Not that the crowd seemed to mind: everyone clapped politely when songs meandered their way into some kind of ending, and when Taylor-Taylor strummed the opening chords of familiar favorites like "Lou Weed," "Bohemian like You," and the new album’s "We Used To Be Friends," there were a few audience cries. But Taylor-Taylor himself just seemed bored. Maybe that’s because he "forgot to get stoned" before the show, as he felt compelled to inform us. Or maybe they were having problems with the sound: Taylor-Taylor did keep asking for more of this and that in his monitors, and his vocals ranged from indistinct to incomprehensible. Meanwhile, the drummer’s two kick drums were the instrumental equivalent of his hair — too much of the wrong thing. Not that he ever seemed to need two kick drums. As for the trumpet player, he spent a lot of time just standing around with his hands in his pockets. Which, come to think of it, was what most of the audience was doing.
BY MATT ASHARE
|
