Review Summary: Better than the other "Black Album". Yes, that one.
I'm perpetually on the cutting edge of the music scene circa a decade ago, so it should come as no surprise that I'm big into The Dandy Warhols. If that math doesn't quite add up, I'm also a decade procrastinating on this review, so at least you can't fault me for inconsistency. The one nice thing about diving into an artist's work after they've established a corpus is that divorced of context you're a lot more likely to give equal time to marginalized works. Is
Nevermind really better than
In Utero? Will people ever recognize that
Illmatic is just two good opening tracks followed by filler every following album topped (including
The Firm)? Are the Beatles really that great?, and other heretical questions that make me glad twitter and google haven't yet invented a way to lynch people through a computer screen.
This...tabula rasa is what allowed me to fully appreciate The Black Album which, let's be honest, is kneecapped right out of the gate by its name. Whether referring to themselves as "the hottest music on the market" in the opening of their debut, larping as the REAL Chuck Berry in the opening to
Odditorium, or the hour long victory lap of
Thirteen Tales, The Dandys come off as quite an arrogant act, but "The Black Album" takes the cake. A title like that means you're upstaging one or all of the following: The Beatles, Metallica, Prince, Jay-Z, or The Beatles again. You've got huevos, I'll give you that, but this is hubris of borderline Greek proportions.
In contrast with the delusions of grandeur the album projects it appears to exist as little more than a blip on the radar of a crowded two-and-a-half-decades old career, and it's easy to see why. After three hit albums
Welcome to the Monkey House was an aimless, uninspiring (but not necessarily uninspired) LP, and it seems like everyone just tacitly agreed the Dandys had already said all there was to say in their first three albums. A trilogy-hit-wonder, I suppose?
There's just one problem.
The Black Album is good, and it deserves to be heard. But it's not just that it's good, it's that it's the special kind of good that's accessible. I don't mean accessible like it has lots of catchy sanitized hooks or appearances by Bruno Mars and Ariana Grande or whoever the MTV face of the week is. I mean that it's so fully representative of everything the Dandys were in their prime that it's the perfect place to start exploring The Dandys. Even their latest albums have quite a few visible parallels.
So why explore The Dandys? I've said this album is good, so by transitive property their music must be good...but there's a lot of good music out there. I could listen to a different good artist every waking moment for the rest of my life and die farther from the goal than I started, so good's not enough. I could say The Dandys are
really good, but if you had the wherewithal to recognize I'm infallible and my opinions are objectively correct 100% of the time, I wouldn't have had to write hundreds of words to get here. So how about this: The Dandys are *cool*. And not just cool, the special kind of cool with range, variety, texture, maybe even just a shade of depth. For a time the Dandys were the coolest bohemian ambassadors since Nico and The Velvet Underground. Put on your best shades and you'll be able to feel yourself become the late-90s-early-00s cooler you as you explore The Dandys surprising diversity of moods.
I really don't like to address individual tracks in a review...it's just so lazy, but here I feel it's essential to adequately convey just how many different notes The Dandys adroitly hit in only 45 minutes. The album opens to their archetypal dreamy shoegaze before making an abrupt switch to their art-student-wearing-boots-with-spurs-and-Texas-belt-buckle number "Crack Cocaine Rager". It's a little bit rhinestone cowboy, a little bit
Fear and Loathing, and even a little Lou Reed. From there we get a smooth transition to Good Morning, a tune you might recognize from their arguably best received album,
Come Down.
This is a good time to mention that The Black Album is apparently actually their original 1996 demo, which absolutely floored me when I found out. The whole album has―paradoxically―a surprisingly crisp lo-fi sheen that really gives the songs a big boost. I've noticed an unpleasant trend in The Dandys' music to give everything a faded, distant quality that dampens the impact of a lot of what should be great moments. Not here. The instruments are present, punchy, and if you've ever heard "Good Morning" before I guarantee when you hear those heavy guitar riffs cut in you won't be able to resist the air guitar urge. I'll admit it could be bias, but I can't think of a single cut on this...this demo that was done better in a later album. Here the jams all sound so much more present, punchy...and passionate! For a band whose steelo has always been the detached "too cool for school" you wouldn't expect it to work as well as it does.
From there we transition to their smooth, hook-driven subversive Monkees joint "Head", their Cocaine Cowboy Dan party anthem "White Gold", before moving to an early rendition of perhaps their best known track, Vodafone notwithstanding, "Boys Better" though here it's just "Boys". Uneven mixing makes this perhaps the best argument that at least one of the tracks on this album was surpassed by a later rendition, but I'm personally not convinced. It's certainly not the highlight of the album. After that we get the obligatory self-indulgent noise track, wherein Courtney Taylor-Taylor goes on a Jazz odyssey and seemingly reaches enlightenment over some leather boots. We get the same but more so in "Earth to the Dandy Warhols". It's boring, but by confining the mid-album doldrums to a pair of obviously signposted tracks it primes the listener for what follows.
We hit a smooth transition into my clear highlight of the album, "Minnesoter". It's a horn-driven unabashed lo-fi garage band jam that you can see in your mind's eye turning a merely good Seattle set into a memorable riot. "Twist" attempts to strike lightning twice, this time substituting the horns for some 70s Scooby Doo chase sequence retro funk rock. Finally, not wanting us to forget who we're listening to comes a cover of―of all things―Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck". This other odyssey, clocking nine minutes, perfectly encapsulates exactly one half of The Dandys in their stoned, shoegazey, dreamfunky, distant music over Taylor-Taylor's half-remembered account of the Edmund Fitzgerald's final voyage. Coda.
I'm not quite sure if
The Black Album is The Dandys' best, but it's undoubtedly the best album to start with. It tells you everything you need to know about The Dandys, puts their best foot forward, and doesn't overstay its welcome. In fact it should leave you wanting more. Of course if you don't like it you'll be objectively wrong, but you'll also be able to confidently say that The Dandys aren't your cup of tea and move on to something else. For everyone else, you've got either the perfect primer to begin exploring their catalogue, or if you're already familiar a great, albeit overlooked LP to dive into.
P.S. The more literate among you may have noticed that this isn't actually "The Black Album", but actually "The Black Album/Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols". That's right, we've got a double album. I neglected to review the second LP because not only would it be another wall of text, but it's not really necessary.
The Black Album stands perfectly fine on its own. Indeed, it should itself be enough to decide if
Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols is worth your time or not.
