The Dandy Warhols lay down a captivating set of their idiosyncratic Indie Rock, covering debut album songs from thirty years ago, to current well regarded material. It all appears contained inside an ever-morphing world of Pop Art.
From the start they were easy to connect with. Their name an homage to the celebrated artist Andy Warhol, and their drone style encompassing alternative Rock to Power Pop to Indie or Shoegaze, making them a seductive offspring to the Velvet Underground of course.
The award-winning documentary Dig! (2004) helped foster their mythology and appeal. They were paired with Brian Jonestown Massacre, and it captures the artistic and emotional tension of two avant-garde music projects and their leaders.
Courtney Taylor-Taylor, guitar and vocalist for the Dandy’s, and Anton Newcombe multi-instrumentalist and singer for Jonestown. They have collaborated and clashed over the years. Taylor was portrayed as the more commercially oriented, Newcombe as prickly and difficult.
A more compelling take on the music industry than Spinal Tap, which was a fictitious mockumentary.
Newcombe and BJM did play a show at this venue late last year, and then proceeded to fall apart on stage with violence in Melbourne.
They start with one of their early classics, Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth (The Dandy Warhols Come Down 1997) and work out on a low-key drone Pop tune.
Peter Holstrom guitar, and the meshed playing with Taylor generates a psychedelic groove repeatedly. Zia McCabe on keyboards and rumbling heavy bass guitar. Brent DeBoer on drums is the essential momentum powering the band.
Shakin’ is their Power Pop side with some processing of the vocals.
Ride goes right back to the beginning, off debut album Dandys Rule OK (1995). Heavy guitar wails and squalls, and the singers harmonize and float above it all. A nod to the British Indie Rock band Ride.
McCabe reminds the elders in the audience that they are celebrating 30 years of the band, before launching into this year’s brand-new single, I’d Like to Help You with Your Problem. She plays a distinctive heavy bass rhythm.
There are songs like Summer of Hate which uses the railway train on the tracks chugging drum rhythms that you hear on Hey! Bo Diddley.
Two of the best from new album ROCKMAKER, released a month ago, are featured.
Danzig With Myself is industrial buzzsaw dissonance echoing the Velvets, along with great vocal performances which can sound like Doo-Wop at times.
I Will Never Stop Loving You features Debbie Harry on the record. On stage tonight and the rhythm machine fires this one up. Gothic and a little heavy
Magic Machine are a new four-piece Rock band from Sydney, and they take us back to the core of the Sixties when various chemical enhancements were in the air and popular music was at a peak of fertility.
Rock music was mushrooming out from a Blues or R’n’B base and becoming psychedelicised.
Cameron Ford, Blake Lambert, James Lambert and Claudio Taccogna begin their set with Pieces of my Brain, all jangling guitars and trashy keyboards. The sound of the American garage bands of the Sixties.
Jingle Jangle/ Bad Boogie has a definite air of The Door’s Roadhouse Blues. Fast R’n’B guitar licks, faster keyboard riffs, and the vocals go through a processor and sound disembodied. They keep pulling in quirky elements and toward Grateful Dead territory.
Day Dreamer is a traditional Rock Blues, played at a slower tempo. They change it up with Western twang, head off towards melodic Surf guitar and end up in Khruangbin country.
Unassuming on stage, but in less than three years they have two albums, a few EPs, and a host of singles.
A good pairing for the Warhols on this Australasian tour.
The Dandy Warhols stretch out and extend the drones as the show progresses, and that is heartwarming.
The big finish is with Boys from their great Black Album (2004).
Keyboards sit in the middle of heavy gothic cathedral sounds. The guitars come in and the atmospheric pressure rises. I can hear the celestial tones of Sister Ray. The drone tones are locked in and keep throwing out elements, including a little of Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein.
It can become endless. The Dandy Warhols finish it though, in triumph.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Leonie Moreland
The Dandy Warhols
The Magic Machine
