Blasts from the past The Dandy Warhols, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and the Raveonettes BY MATT ASHARE

The notion that pop will eat itself is an old and tired one. Rock and roll had its own recycling program long before placing a Campbell’s soup can in with the rest of your trash was a ticketable offense. Indeed, the history of rock music has been a story of artists begging, borrowing, and outright stealing riffs, melodies, and ideas from the past, from their contemporaries, from other cultures around the world. It’s an inherent result of rock’s recombinant nature. But it wasn’t until digital-sampling technology met hip-hop’s cut-and-paste æsthetic that problematic questions about artistic copyrights and ownership were raised as studio-savvy rappers refashioned hits wholesale from chart toppers of the past. While the lawyers argued over who owned what, artists and critics were forced to come up with a new set of standards by which to judge "originality." And as sampling fought for its rightful place among other musical talents — just as photography battled for its place on the walls of fine-art establishments during the first half of the 20th century — a generation of musicians with very different ideas about the importance of originality came of age.

I don’t think it’s any accident that we’re seeing more and more albums devoted to covering material by other songwriters — usually well-known tunes from the past. It’s a given that pop singers look elsewhere for the songs that make them stars: it’s been that way since before Elvis shocked the world with his gyrations, and it’ll be that way long after we all finally agree that the King isn’t among us anymore. But when a band like the ghoulish punk-metal Misfits opt to release an entire album of ’50s classics (their recent Misfits/Ryko release Project 1950) and an underground singer-songwriter like Mark Kozelek of San Francisco’s Red House Painters fills an entire CD and most of an EP with radical reinterpretations of AC/DC tunes — 2001’s What’s Next to the Moon and 2000’s Rock ’N’ Roll Singer (both Badman) — then something’s up. Especially since we now have a punk supergroup of sorts, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, who are three albums into a career built on nary an original tune. Their shtick is that they can turn anything from a Broadway show tune to a sensitive ’70s singer-songwriter number into a swift, melodic, pop-punk gem.

A more telling sign of our postmodern times is the emergence of artists and bands who have sifted back through the sands of time to unearth a particular band, album (i.e., Pet Sounds), or song ("Sister Ray") to emulate. There have always been popular trends that rip their way through the fabric of contemporary culture until, suddenly, the idiosyncratic signs and sounds of a particular era are back in fashion. Yet that kind of wholesale nostalgia does not account for a band like the Dandy Warhols, the Portland (Oregon) foursome who got their start eight years ago with Dandys Rule OK? (Tim/Kerr), a debut album that wasn’t a tidy fit for any of alternative rock’s proliferating subgenres. What made more of an impact than the Dandys’ ’60s-ish garage-band sound was their name — an obvious reference to the king of pop art — and the way, on the track "(Tony, This Song Is Called) Lou Weed," singer/guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor delivered a spot-on imitation of a young Lou Reed.

The Velvet Underground have been providing B-side fodder since the early ’80s, when bands like R.E.M., the Feelies, and Dream Syndicate revived various aspects of the VU sound, style, and attitude. In fact, each of the Velvet Underground’s four main studio albums is distinct enough to have spawned its own branch of indie rock, and VU crazes have gone in and out of fashion for more than two decades now. But the Dandy Warhols did not appear to be part of a Velvet Underground resurgence. They stood alone amid a growing mosh pit of punk-derived alternatives, and it wasn’t until the Strokes emerged in 2001 with their own Reedy attitude that you could point to another band as peers.

By that time, the Dandys had moved out of the garage and into a slicker, new-wavier æsthetic for two Capitol albums — 1997’s The Dandy Warhols Come Down and 2000’s Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia — that spawned enough in the way of minor singles ("Bohemian like You" became their best-known song as a result of its use in a Vodafone commercial) to keep the label happy. Yet neither album had a track that even approached the impact of "Lou Weed" — which probably started as a joke. The Dandy Warhols were stuck somewhere between the strum-and-drone of Velvetsy pop and the synth-and-drum programming of ’80s new wave.

Fortunately, Taylor-Taylor seems to have realized that the sleek, shiny surfaces of classic commercial new wave have a lot more in common with Warholian pop art than anything the Velvets ever recorded does. It’s no surprise that Warhol himself became involved with the Cars — their intense attention to surface detail and the sense of hyperreality created by their songs was the musical equivalent of his Factory-built silkscreens. The Dandys’ new Welcome to the Monkey House (Capitol) features an unzipped banana on the cover in homage to two of Warhol’s more famous album covers — the banana on the Velvet Underground’s first album (the untitled "Banana Album") and the zipper on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

Any reference to the Velvets or the Stones ends there, as the Dandys embrace the ’80s with help from Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon (the hungry-as-a-wolf singer lends his vocal talents to "Plan A") and Nick Rhodes (he sticks to co-producing the disc with Bowie veteran Tony Visconti), as well as Chic guitarist/producer Nile Rodgers (who was also part of the Duran Duran offshoot Power Station). Their combined impact is at once apparent in the synthetic crunch of the guitar that bolsters a bored-sounding Taylor-Taylor as he attempts to sum up the confused state of who owns what in the realm of contemporary pop: "Wire is coming back again/Elastica got sued by them/When Michael Jackson dies we’re covering ‘Blackbird’/And won’t it be absurd then/When no one knows what song they just heard/Unless someone on the radio tells them first."

Point well taken — especially since Taylor-Taylor seems to be mimicking the delivery of Love and Rockets vocalist Daniel Ash. A quick allusion to an ultimately obscure glammy new-wave one-hit wonder who formed out of the ashes of Bauhaus (themselves remembered mainly for their note-for-note cover of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars") is just the kind of in-joke you’d expect from a band who called a song "Lou Weed." But Welcome to the Monkey House, whose title is drawn from the 1968 Kurt Vonnegut short-story collection, goes on to plunder the Love and Rockets sound, appropriating everything from the folkish acoustic-guitar refrains that marked the band’s semi-hit "No New Tale To Tell" — itself a Jethro Tull parody that seemed to suggest there was nothing new under the sonic sun — to the jarring, atonal synth sounds that peppered their cover of "Ball of Confusion" to the soulful close-harmony background vocals that contrasted so heavily with the band’s cold, programmed grooves.

Did Taylor-Taylor use some sort of random number generator to decide whom the Dandy Warhols would model their next CD after? Or does he believe that Love and Rockets were ahead of their time and that the world is now ready for a similar-sounding band? Either way, the thinking seems nothing short of absurd. Perhaps that’s the point. If nothing else, the harmony vocals, big beats, and throbbing bass on Welcome to the Monkey House are a DJ remixer’s dream: any of the 13 tracks here could have a second life.

IF A DEAD-ON LOU REED IMPERSONATION from an Oregon band seemed strange in 1995, then the sudden emergence of a Bay Area trio who had the look and sound of the Jesus and Mary Chain in 2001 was just plain bizarre. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (B.R.M.C.) came out of nowhere with their homonymous Virgin debut, an attitude-heavy collection of white-noise-powered guitars, fuzztone bass, echoey backbeats, and dark, druggy lyrics. On "Whatever Happened to My Rock ’N’ Roll (Punk Song)," they asked and answered their own question. After the demise of the J&M Chain, there wasn’t anyone out there making that kind of beautiful noise out of what B.R.M.C. referred to as "that simple chord" until B.R.M.C. came along and did it themselves. Never mind that the J&M Chain never enjoyed much commercial success in the US, or that there was no ground swell of interest in bringing them back: B.R.M.C. had found their sound, and they were sticking to it.

The band’s new Take Them On, on Your Own (Virgin) picks up where their debut left off, with bass buzzing, guitars churning on the verge of feedback, and a straightforward backbeat powering dark-toned, psychedelic punk anthems that owe less to the J&M Chain. There’s a stronger taste of the Stooges in both the vocals and the howling guitars of the nihilistic "Six Barrel Shotgun." And the success of "Punk Song" in England has apparently inspired B.R.M.C. to follow up with a number of similarly-styled hard-hitting tracks. But it would be hard to point to any trend in the underground or elsewhere that would account for a J&M Chain–styled band’s popping up on the West Coast.

If B.R.M.C. took the whole of the Reid Brothers’ catalogue as a jumping-off point, the Danish duo the Raveonettes seem to have focused on one specific moment in the J&M Chain’s career — the point at which Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval jumped on board for a torchy duet with Jim Reid. Guitarist Sune Rose Wagner and bassist Sharin Foo also sing harmonies together.

But there’s a whole lot of shtick in the Raveonettes’ brand of retro rock. They record all their songs in the key of B-flat minor. They also apply the same echo-rich, distortion-drenched wall-of-sound production that the J&M Chain pioneered on Psychocandy to the same brand of three-chord rock-and-roll songwriting. And that’s where comparisons with B.R.M.C. start to break down. Because the Raveonettes’ æsthetic also has its roots in the same b-movie cheese as does the Cramps’ — as the title of their US debut full-length, Chain Gang of Love (Columbia), suggests. In that sense, they’re as much out there on their own as the Dandy Warhols and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, revisiting their own little corner of rock and roll’s ever expanding landscape for inspiration and returning with songs that are proudly out of step with the dominant trends of the day.