Pop art

The Dandy Warhols' Velvetsy rock

by Matt Ashare

Given their name, the Dandy Warhols, and the homage/parody "Lou Weed," a wry Velvetsy number from the band's 1995 debut, Dandys Rule OK (Tim/Kerr), there's clearly some Velvet Underground coursing through the bloodstream of this Oregon foursome. Singer/guitarist Courtney Taylor has a handle on Papa Lou's deadpan smirk and the chugging guitar rhythms that made Velvets pop songs like "Foggy Notion" and "What Goes On" rock. In fact, the Dandy Warhols, who play Harborlights this Saturday with Radiohead and Teenage Fanclub, would probably have been a better fit for Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable -- they're more the rock equivalent of pop art than the Velvets, who were more about art-damaged pop. Like Andy himself, the Dandy Warhols would rather observe, appropriate, and refract than actively reflect and/or comment on matters of politics and culture. They're feel-good music for bad times, ignoring the big picture and, to appropriate a song from another Warholian band, the Cars, letting the good times roll.

Reed himself has tried that tack. One of my favorite moments in a Velvet Underground tune is when he practically croons the line "There are problems in these times/But oooh none of them are mine" in "Beginning To See the Light." It's an East Coast kissoff to California's politically active hippie rockers; it's also a darkly cynical admission that things have reached such a bad state, it's not even worth caring anymore.

There isn't a single moment like that on the new The Dandy Warhols Come Down (Capitol). How could there be when the Warhols embody the statement "There are problems in these times/But oooh none of them are mine." Take the single "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth," a psychedelic pop nugget coated in gooey layers of rich guitar distortion and creamy organ drones topped off with a sweet sing-along vocal line that belies the otherwise grim subject matter. "I never thought you'd be a junkie," Taylor sings, "because heroin is so . . . " Dangerous? Thrilling? Destructive? Taboo? No, nothing that serious: "I never thought you'd be a junkie because heroin is so passŽ." Kinda like deadpan Lou summing up the grisly OD in "Street Hassle" as nothing more, or less, than "bad luck."

Taylor and his cohort -- guitarist Peter Holmstrom, keyboardist Zia McCabe, and drummer Eric Hedford -- don't refer to Reed and the Velvets as directly here as they did on their debut. The scrappy strum-and-drone guitars, which are one of the Velvets' more lasting gifts to indie rock and which set the tone on Dandys Rule OK, have grown into darker-hued, slow-swirling washes of churning psychedelia, an almost hedonistically plush cushion of undulating melody on top of which the voices of Taylor and McCabe float in a way Reed came close to only when he had Bowie producing (on Transformer).

Not that the Warhols have given up on copping riffs and dealing in pop-cult signifiers. The escapist "Every Day Should Be a Holiday" has a synth line so close to Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime," it wouldn't be surprising to hear Taylor allude to peanut butter or CBGB's. The queasy, narcotic trippiness of "Green" and "Orange" brings to mind the lysergic emanations of a band who took the Velvets drugginess to an obscene extreme, England's Spaceman 3. (The Dandys' "Hard On for Jesus" comes in somewhere between the simmering sarcasm of the Velvets' folky "Jesus" and the gonzo looniness of Spaceman 3's "Walking with Jesus.")

Then there's "Cool As Kim Deal," a "Lou Weed"-style inside joke that ends before you can figure out whether Taylor is making fun, having fun, or offering praise between smirks. Not that it matters. The name dropping, like Taylor's junkie bashing, is just a strategy to let the Warhols lay into a timeless garage-rock chord progression (the '60s Rolling Stones doing "Fortune Teller" is the basic idea) with some cheesy Farfisa organ riffing and feel-good guitars.

"I'd rather be cool than be smart," Taylor sings in the first verse of "Cool As Kim Deal." Actually, it's just a reprise of what Lou had to say in "Beginning To See the Light." People OD on self-awareness every day -- they forget to forget and enjoy little things like a cool guitar riff or a suave mod haircut. In pop music, that kind of behavior results in too many humorless bands like Pearl Jam and Live. (One or two is cool, but who needs a second-rate whiner?) If there's a message on The Dandy Warhols Come Down, it's that getting too wrapped up in the problems of these times is just so passŽ. n

The Dandy Warhols and Teenage Fanclub open for Radiohead at the Harborlights Pavilion this Saturday, August 23; call (617) 423-NEXT. They're also playing T.T. the Bear's next Friday, August 29, with Polara; call (617) 492-BEAR.

Matt Ashare can be reached at mashare[a]phx.com.