Dandy Warhols

Dandy Warhols
Emo’s
Ausin, Texas

ConcertDandywarhols
Portland, Oregon-founded alternative rock band The Dandy Warhols (singer-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor, guitarist Peter Holmstrom, keyboardist Zia McCabem, and drummer Brent DeBoer) are noted for their classics “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth” and their most famous “Bohemian Like You,” and have found success with their music featured in films, television shows, and commercials such as The Replacements, MythBusters, and a Ford Focus car range commercial.

Austin’s casual nightclub Emo’s was an appropriate fit for the band’s brand of psychedelic alternative that meshes The Velvet Underground, Primal Scream, and the Pixies. Hypnotic and free-flowing as their music, the band seemed to undergo a lull that kept them concentrated on what they needed to deliver to their audience. A number of musical techniques were employed: long instrumental passages, charging guitar-driven rock, and screeching electronic effects alongside angst, words of redemption, and hallucinatory vocalizing. “I Am Free,” from their latest album This Machine (2012), had regular cadence, while the entrancing “I Love You,” from the 1997 outing …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, featured a building, lyric-less coda.

While other songs such as their staple “We Used to Be Friends” and “Everyday Should Be a Holiday” were spotlighted, “Holding Me Up,” from 2005’s Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, became the centerpiece: screeching guitars and electronic effects, red-orange lights flashing down to give the impression of fire, a rotating disco ball projecting white circles against the black backdrop of the curtains, and audience participation through clapping.

One might call their music “psychedelic-tinged alterna-cool”: they exuded a cool vibe and remained focused, seemingly undisturbed by their surroundings; it was just them and their music, lost in the high of their performance.

by Jeff Boyce