Graham Reid | | 1 min read
The Summer of Hate
Despite their seemingly ramshackle career, Portland's Dandy Warhols have survived line-up changes, being seduced by the major label Capitol, being dropped, making poor business choices and albums which changed their direction from ragged indie rock to psychedelia, synth-pop, New Wave influences and shoegaze.
They often seemed casually dismissive of any career releasing singles like Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth, and didn't make it easy for those with just a passing interest: they covered Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Ted Nugent's Free For All and AC/DC's Hell's Bells (among other oddly diverse selections).
And their last album Tafelmuzik Means More When You're Alone ran to 214 minutes. That's longer than any Lord of the Rings film or Dune Part Two.
However, their slacker attitude might be a cover for some serious smarts, after all they've lasted two decades, RockMaker is their 12th studio album (alongside five live releases and two compilations), they worked with Nile Rodgers, opened for Bowie at his request and have a number of songs remixed for dancefloors.
On RockMaker, Iggy Pop's dispassionate delivery and dyspeptic disposition appears to be the key influence on frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor.
Summer of Hate channels Iggy as chairman of the bored (“I was born in the summer of love and lived through the summer of hate”) and again on Alcohol, Cocaine, Marijuana, Nicotine, both coming to a DJ turntable near you soon.
Blondie's Debbie Harry appears on the theatrically dramatic I Will Never Stop Loving You where Taylor-Taylor again adopts Iggy's whispery, menacing baritone while she provides the ethereal voice of Beauty to his Beast. There's a Gothic rock opera waiting for this.
The album also features Slash on the grinding sludge rock of I'd Like to Help You With Your Problem: “All of our operators are currently assisting other callers. If this is an emergency, please hang up. Somebody will help you shortly.”
Teutonic Wine is like Beck's slacker anthem Loser shoved through a mincer with buzz-saw guitar thrown in to spice up the mix and Love Thyself with Black Francis (of the Pixies) plays into his more pop-rock orientation as Frank Black.
He appears again on the neatly titled Danzig With Myself.
No word play left unmolested by the Dandy Warhols.
In places this is fun but after a couple of plays things wear thin and very little of what is here sounds like it has serious legs . And maybe the amount of effort is signalled by the mundane cover art.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here
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