Welcome To The Monkey House

08/27/2003 10:00 PM, LAUNCH
Rob O'Connor

The Dandy Warhols are now doing something that's technically called "playing both sides of the fence," or "expanding the hip vernacular." As a down and dirty, tawdry and tackily glitzy garage band for four albums, they emulated the Velvet Underground alongside their delightfully pretentious glam-rock sneers. For their fifth album, they still hawk the Velvet's--that's their "banana" being prominently redisplayed on the cover--but they've juxtaposed this with a very unlikely pairing with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes as their producer. Names alone aren't what count. But the very '80's production says "Duran Duran" in very subtle ways. "I Am Over It" could be a Gary Numan outtake, while the other songs here also cling close to a line of electrified beats, robotic vocals and the sort of ethereal psychedelia that came into vogue long after the '60s party finally extinguished itself sometime in the '70s. They haven't exactly created a "new" music, but perhaps a new decade. Intriguing.