Album Review: The Dandy Warhols - Why You So Crazy (2019)

The thing about The Dandy Warhols is that they have their moments. Moments of real promise. Moments that transport you back to the band’s turn of the century pomp. Little glimpses of what the Portland band offered on a couple of terrific albums from that era; The Dandy Warhols Come Down (1997), and Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000). Those albums were slightly flawed masterpieces in one way or another, but on each one, the good overwhelmingly outweighed the bad.

Sadly, almost inevitably, on every Dandys album released over the past decade or so, the opposite applies, and those moments have been fewer and further between. They’re still there, those ever-infrequent morsels of hope, but in truth, it’s a hope that’s framed only by ill-conceived faith, and “moments” are probably not enough anymore. Not when they’ve been doing this thing for a quarter of a century or more. Give or take. 

So we get a few moments on Why You So Crazy, most notably when the band stick to tried and trusted formulas - with the almost Velvet Underground-aping fuzzy power pop psychedelia of (lead single) ‘Be Alright’, and the Iggy-lite country/redneck parody of ‘Motor City Steel’. Beyond that, there’s not much here to get excited about. 

There’s quite a lot of that faux-country groove thing they’ve so often used for filler on past releases. More than might be considered wise, and it reeks of a tacit acceptance that nobody takes the band too seriously anymore. With a sense that the band itself is saying: “you can’t take this shit seriously, we clearly don’t, so don’t even try” ... or perhaps it’s merely that the band just don’t have any fresh pop hooks these days, so they revert to the comfort zone of a long-held default. 

As for the rest of the material on Why You So Crazy, amid a procession of not-all-that-interesting noise, I can make out fragments of songs, or ideas, mostly half-formed, some more developed than others, but to call them “songs” would surely be overstating it. They’re just moments - thirty second glimpses into what might have been. What once was, but no longer is. 

I had high hopes for this release. Even when armed with the knowledge that the past decade hasn’t been kind, I hoped that the good would outweigh the bad. But it’s always the hope that kills you, right?