The Dandy Warhols - Earth to the Dandy Warhols
Speak n Spell
By Andrew P Street
Getting dropped has suited The Dandy Warhols. Without a corporate master they’ve clearly decided to do whatever they damn well like.
What’s particularly odd, then, is that Earth To… is the most accessible Warhols album since Thirteen Tales: gone are the self-conscious 80s-synthisms of Welcome To The Monkey House or the impenetrable psych workouts of Odditorium or Warlords Of Mars. Instead we get the happy-clappy three-chord vamp of ‘The World The People Come Together (Come On)’, while ‘Welcome To The Third World’ is somewhere between Bowie circa ‘Let’s Dance’ and agit-prop beat poetry – but it shows off a musicianship in the band unimaginable two albums ago, which even allows one to over look the fact that ‘Talk Radio’ completely rips off Status Quo’s ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’.
Mark goddamn Knopfler even turns up on ‘Love Song’ and ‘Mis Amigos’ takes a trip to some sci-fi pueblo south of the border. It won’t spark a Dandy’s revolution (there’s nothing approaching ‘Bohemian Like You’ or ‘We Used To Be Friends’ for hitsmanship) but my word, they sound chipper.