Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

There's a fine line between being bored and being boring, a line that deadpan Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor prances along as though he doesn't know it exists. The Portland-based Dandys started out by recycling the Brit shoegazer pop of My Bloody Valentine and Ride, which proved an unexpectedly deep sonic well to draw from. But Taylor's lyrical imagination-basically he browsed his CD shelves, tossing out a wiseass quip for every disc in his collection-seemed a more limited resource. The excitement was in seeing which he'd run out of first, quips or CDs. Fortunately, before it came to that, he developed into a funny if not particularly original observer of hipster mores: "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" ("I never thought you'd be a junkie because heroin is so pass and "Bohemian Like You" (with its artfully ripped off "Jumpin' Jack Flash" riff) depicted scenes anyone who's spent some time on the fringe would quickly recognize.

The band's fourth album, Welcome to the Monkey House, starts out on familiar ground with nonsensically referential lyrics ("Wire's coming back again/ Elastica got sent by them"-whatever). But their songwriting has tightened up, and they've cultivated a tricky electro bottom, both developments which may perhaps be due to the production assistance they've enlisted. Any Anglophile can adopt a foppish demeanor, but you've got to have a deep-seated, neurotic desire to be British if you bring in Nick Rhodes to produce. As you'll recall, Nick was one of the Durans who formed the fey Arcadia, not the funky Power Station, and he's definitely of the frills-and-ruffles school of synthpop. There's a trade-off-while these tracks are rich in detail ("I Am Sound," for instance, has a neat keyboard that approximates Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes") there's an effete thinness underneath, a pseudofunk sway that sounds all the more dinky when contrasted with more rhythmically muscular cuts like "The Scientist."

Another problem with the increasingly popwise Dandys is that the vocals are brought to the front, so that lines like "No one knows what song they just heard/ Unless someone on the radio tells them first" don't sink into the mix where they belong. Pop cynicism is easiest to take when it's funny, but at his worst, Taylor's all ironic impulse and no follow through, like one of those tools on VH1's "I Love the '80s" who's like, "Yeah, man, Eddie Murphy-who let him make a record?" It's no coincidence that Monkey House is never more successful than on the lovely "Insincere Because I," in which Taylor's vocals bob gently amid a sea of synths. I mean, no one cared what Ride had to say, right? Or Duran Duran, for that matter.