Heroin may be passé, as the Dandy Warhols noted on 1997 semi-hit "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth", but in rock culture, self-destruction never is. Nick Drake and Elliott Smith died blessedly dive-bar jukebox-bound, while Donovan and Smog rumble along in comparative obscurity. Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley never sang in a band called Audioslave. Sure, the case of Burning Out v. Fading Away is moot when it comes to assessing actual musical merit, but as precedent in the court of cred (gawd, remember that?) it's never been overturned.
If last year's Sundance-approved documentary DiG! showed us anything about the Dandy Warhols, it's that these four psychedelic power-poppers from Portland, Oregon, are immaculately versed in the tenets of cred-conscious self-mythologizing. Throughout the film, the band's foil is San Francisco psych-rock outfit the Brian Jonestown Massacre, whose lead singer, Anton Newcombe, is portrayed as a tortured artist whose fiery genius ultimately consumes him. Dandies frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor, stingingly aware he lacks his hero's gifts, nevertheless mimics Newcombe's much-trodden rock-star antics-- heavy drug use, sociopathic tendencies, delusions of grandeur-- all the while stretching one foot ever further through the door to the commercial success that inevitably eludes Newcombe, like Gatsby's green light. Even the Warhols' early song titles ("Lou Weed", "Ride", "Cool as Kim Deal") come off as signifiers of cred from a band desperate to attain what to Newcombe comes so naturally.
Thus, given the chance to piggyback on DiG!'s success, the Dandies ask, "What would a self-destructive genius do?"-- and promptly shoot themselves in both feet. The result, fifth album Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, looks like an attempt to rebut that movie's careerist image of the band, instead brandishing its sloppy difficulty like a severed ear. "Don't get caught trying-- ever," Taylor-Taylor admonished in a recent interview. If the statement hits neatly upon the defining ethos of indie-rock in the 1990s, it fails to consider that songwriting and creativity, not just laziness and pot fumes, propelled the rise of slacker icons like Beck and Pavement. Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece. The whole thing smacks of effortful effortlessness, man.
Odditorium lays its first claim to cracked brilliance through sheer, stultifying sprawl (oh, and that off-putting title). Listeners must first wade through a glaringly unfunny spoken-word opener, the inexplicably titled "Colder Than the Coldest Winter Was Cold". Then, on "Love is the New Feel Awful", Taylor-Taylor floats whispery vocals atop a chugging spaced-out groove for its first three-plus minutes; for the next six, it's aimless guitar mutilation, "A Day in the Life" orchestral squealing, and shrill free-jazz hornfuck. The next track, "Easy", is a more concise 7:32, but this time T2 mumbles his verses into morose oblivion. "Holding Me Up" recalls the fuzzed-out alt-pop of the band's first three albums, then hits repeat for another inessential three minute outro. The 12-minute, slow-motion krautrock hum of "A Loan Tonight" is as irredeemable as its title pun. "Odditorium" is what the Dandies call their studio; a good portion of its namesake should still be on the facility's floor.
The same studied perversity also pervades the shorter songs. "All the Money or the Simple Life Honey", uptempo with "Soul Man" horns and rattling acoustic guitar, manages to spew both typical fame-sucks pablum (dudes, you're only the Dandy Warhols) and positively prehistoric anti-sellout raillery: "You're playing in a rock 'n' roll band, but still you're doing whatever the Man says." Pretty much the Dandies' half of DiG!, come to think of it. "Down Like Disco" jangles like "Minnesoter", from the band's 1997 Come Down, only sped-up Kanye-style, while unfortunate could-be indie-yuppie staple "Everyone Is Totally Insane" is the only time Odditorium echoes the hooky synth-pop of 2003's intermittently impressive Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. Hard-partying first single "Smoke It" feints Rolling Stones-ward until the familiar riff registers: Yup, that's the Hives "Hate to Say I Told You So". The piano-splashed one-chord mantra of "There Is Only This Time" (more horns, more Faust!) is mercifully capped at 4:40.
True to form, the Dandies maintain plausible deniability about Odditorium's ostensible ambitions, always leaving open the Ann Coulter defense: If you don't like it, it was only a joke (you humorless sack of jihadist-spunk). First, there's the title again. Elsewhere, "The New Country" lodges a banjo firmly in its hipster-hoedown cheek. Dogs growl throughout sing-songy "Did You Make a Song With Otis", with lyrics about beer and "Poopy" tuning a guitar. And if the opener-- "You're listening to a piece of history," A&E;'s Bill Kurtis pronounces in a rich Midwestern baritone-- doesn't exactly bring, well, any yucks, still Shirley it can't be serious, uh, right? A few jokes are overt, and uniformly excoriable: "People got more baggage than JFK/ And I'm talking about the airport, man!"
And then there are the drugs. The Dandies still take a lot of them, kids. At least they want you to think they do, because they never shut up about them. "Great pot," a man's voice proclaims at the end of "Everyone Is Totally Insane"; "I wanna get high," goes "Down Like Disco". Yeah, "Smoke It", OK, we get it. In DiG!, the Dandies show up for a photo shoot at a house the Brian Jonestown Massacre rented in Los Angeles, a house still trashed from a party the night before-- a party the Dandies didn't attend. Odditorium is an album of secondhand decadence, of hand-me-down self-destruction that the fleeting tunes can never support. At least the Dandies can say they didn't try. But that's an insult to everyone who ever did.
