One album sure to be on “best album’s of 2010″ lists everywhere come December is LCD Soundsystem’s electronic-rock masterpiece This Is Happening. Webcuts’ Nathan Goldman awarded the record eight and half stars out of ten astutely observing that that the album was “Stunningly mature but also a really good time, it is front man James Murphy’s best and most complex explanation of himself, told in terms of fascinating and longing.” (full review).

Listening to the album, LCD’s third and most accomplished, is a bittersweet experience as its been widely reported that the opus will be the band’s last. But as the following interview during a visit to Australia as part of Splendour in the Grass indicates it may just be the end of LCD Soundsystem part uno. Chris Berkley from Static asks the big questions while LCD’s big man with the plan James Murphy answers.

Now that you’ve gone on record and warned people that This Is Happening is the last LCD album is every show a farewell? Are there people with tears in their eyes in the front row and that kind of thing?

I’m trying to minimise the histrionics, because we won’t stop touring until September 2011 so there are very few places that we’re playing right now that we won’t come back to. I think towards the end, next summer, it may feel like that. But for me right know it’s like phase one of the tour and I’m just looking forward to phase two and trying new things.

So you’re going to have to spend next year saying to people “this is definitely the last time you’ll see us”?

It’s not necessarily the last record. I would make another record. It’s more the end of this part – three records that go together, an arc. We became a bigger band than I ever expected. Something needs to stop, for me, for us all to be happy. Everyone has lives and kids and things like that, I just want it to go back to being a smaller part of our lives as a business of being a professional rock band, with tours, albums, videos and singles and tours and all that stuff. I think we’ve done the best of that that we can. We’ve gotten much farther, than expected or hoped. And if we were making another record in the same trajectory I’d be having a very hard time right now. I’d be having a bit of a crisis. I don’t know what my reasoning to plug on would be.

The main thing for me is that I don’t really want to be a famous person and I feel that we’re in a great place right now as a band where we’ve had a lot of access – people have been very nice to us and we’ve been allowed to play where we want — but I can get on a plane and nobody knows who the hell we are, you know? Which is really the measure: Can you get on a plane and do people know who you are? And nobody knows who we are.

Well from the very start there’s been a refreshing lack of artifice from both LCD Soundsystem and DFA about what you do. From your debut single “Losing My Edge” which was a very self-deprecating song, even to the art show that’s being installed this week which is called “That’s cool but can you make it more shit?”

That’s actually what we would say to Michael the art director who is putting the show up. It’s all very weird. I’m just excited that we have another New York friend here. Not that we have anything against traveling or the people we know around the world but our New York friens are a really incredible group of people that we’re very, very close to and love very, very much. And when we get to see some of them in different parts of the world it’s incredibly wonderful.

It is a novelty because you want to share those touring experiences with them as well and have fun in other places.

Yeah it’s also to share that “Oh my god you have to eat here, you have to meet these people, this is amazing…”. You just want to keep sharing that stuff with your friends.

Having that attitude also been your motto, like the name of the show, in terms of the way you’ve run the band and run the label?

Sort of. DFA isn’t DFA records. DFS isn’t DFA productions. It’s always been a group of friends and Michael’s always been one of them. There’s just this group of people who have always stuck by each other and gone out and partied and always been more fun than kids that were older than us, or kids who were younger than us. A group you could count on to be simultaneously incredibly solid and amazing people but as also as fun as a bunch of really shallow party monsters. That’s always been a big part of me — that’s what DFA is to me, a group of people. The fact that there’s a label, band, production, remix or something that’s just an emblem of that. It’s all DFA.

Since you’ve got this group of friends and support network around the world were you worried, when you decamped to LA to make This Is Happening, that what was special about the band may not have been able to be captured somewhere other than New York?

No because I’ve never done an album starting in New York. All the singles were made in New York but for the first album I went to a farm in Western Massachusetts in the country, which is pretty far away from New York. The second record I went to the same farm but I made it all silver with tinfoil. For the third record the farm was closed, and I was like “crap!” I had to figure something else out.

I thought getting a mansion in LA would be hilarious, it would be so anathematic to what we are. But also I like that stuff, I’m not just a working man. I like big dumb rock gestures and I think they’re missing, even big rock bands are little pedestrian and a little too business minded. So we had this big ramshackle mansion and we brought everybody out. At some points we had twenty people living in the mansion rambling around. Everyone had to wear white, so it looked like a cult and we’d go swimming in the pool and work on a song. So we imported the people, they’d come out for a week and then go back to New York.

So there wasn’t much outside influence? I thought if any place to lose yourself in superficiality it might’ve been somewhere like Los Angeles.

No, the way we describe it’s like a very New York way of doing things. In a good sense it’s a good New York way, in a bad sense it’s a terrible American way in that we went and recorded in the LA of our imagination, of our mind. It was this perfect 1974 LA, we ignored what LA is actually like and just went and created and imposed our idea of LA on LA. And the funny thing is it really worked.

We’d go to parties in groups of twenty people in white and we made a dent, it was a really fun time. Our friends who live in LA were saying “you guys can’t leave!”. Even though we were only there for three months we started a regular party at this place called Temporary Spaces with our chef who is a DJ and was living with us. It was an amazing time. (pauses) EMI will never pay for me to make another record. (laughs)

That’s why you have to stop. They saw the receipts from This Is Happening.

No, but if I ever did it again I would go back to that house again and make another record. But I don’t think they’d ever do it.

Obviously you’re going to tour this record into the ground, have you thought about your next move or do you not need to worry about that for the next eighteen months?

Half the reason I want to stop is so I don’t have to make a plan. Right now I know what I’m doing for the next year and a half. I’m 40, I’m not a kid, and I don’t have children and I’d like children, so to know that until I’m almost 42 I’m tied up…

Well I vote you wear boxer shorts for the next two years. Let’s keep everything in check.

(laughs) Exactly no briefs, no hot tubs!

…but I just want to be able to be more fluid with my decision making, and that’s what I’m looking forward to after this. To be like – oh, I want to try and work with this person on an opera, and I’m going to work on that, and I have an art project want to do with the New York City subway system that I’m really dedicated to and there’s some writing — writing, writing — I want to do, and there’s a film I want to make. There are a lot of things I want to do.

And soundtrack composing? After dipping your toe in the water with Greenburg, was that exciting?

It was and it wasn’t. It was great but I’m not really interested in doing soundtracks. This was a special case, I’d admired the director’s work then I met him and got on with him amazingly well, it was like hanging out with an old friend. It was like making something for a friend and I didn’t have to deal with the industry at all, because the only industry worse than music is film, you know?

First broadcast on Static on 29/07/10. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

For a band who were always going to burn out before they faded away, punk infidels The Scare are sadly/happily/stupidly (delete as appropriate) calling it a day. Ending on a high with the undeniable brilliance and raw power of 2009′s OOZEVOODOO, drummer Samuel Pearton posted this message earlier today (15th June) on his Facebook…

“the scare announced it’s break-up after 7 long years of touring, craziness and all the rest of it. we are doing a last run of shows in July.. thankyou to everyone who ever helped the band, UK peeps totally included. hope to see as many of you as possible at the last shows.”

EMI, the band’s record company followed up with the press release below.

“It was a fun ride, it was a wild ride, at times it was a shit ride, at times you wanted it to never end type of ride.  But alas all good things must come to an end, and now it’s our turn.”  Kiss Reid 2010

I don’t think anyone that worked with The Scare or the guys themselves thought it would last this long… It was always destined to explode in some format.

The Scare who moved to Birmingham , UK when they were 18 quickly became the darlings of drink coasters such as NME and Kerrang magazines along with festivals such as Reading and Download both putting the band on their bill.

Below Par Records signed the band and released their debut album Chivalry in 2007 which was reviewed with mixed emotions, to which the band nearly issued this very same media release deciding that it wasn’t their time just yet.

The Scare then headed back into the studio with Daniel Johns to record and release their most defining work to date OOZEVOODOO, their sophomore album released in 2009.  It culminated all that had happened to them over the past 5 years and delivered them to this final moment now.

From playing on the Big Day Out tour in Australia, lead singer Kiss burning kids in the city of Brighton at 5am one morning to rave 9/10 album reviews in the UK and then not having enough money to get back over there, The Scare was always a juxtaposition that could never be resolved.

Kiss Reid, Wade Keighran, William O’Brien, Brock Fitzgerald and Samuel Pearton would like to thank everyone that helped them in their story to now and will be forever appreciative.

In a final last effort to take something once more, The Scare will be playing the following farewell shows:

Friday 9th of July – Sussex Inlet Tavern, Sussex Inlet NSW
Saturday 10th July – Rats at Colonial Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Friday 16th July – Night Eats Day at Grand Hotel, Wollongong NSW
Saturday 17th July – Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW*
* Supports at Annandale – Zeahorse and Psychonanny

With all band members currently dividing their time in side projects, moonlighting in other bands, doing session work or hustling for tricks on Crown st, this probably isn’t the last you’ll hear from the boys.

Less a seething juggernaut full of sharp teeth, no sleep and clenched fists baying at a fearful crowd, The Scare’s howl these days is more precise and directed, a volley of basslines and drum fills, guitar strings clenched like arrows in a bow, the loose-limbed puppet stance of vocalist Kiss Reid, is now arched and focussed, his once wild shoulder length hair cropped short to now resemble a young Michael Hutchence, minus Hutchence’s charismatic draw. Once the weakest link, he’s become their greatest asset. The rest of the band themselves are almost unrecognisable these days. In England, they had an air of ‘ASBO’s with guitars’ about them, but back home in Australia, 18 months later and it’s like watching an entirely different band spring to life. Not so much reborn, but revived.

In celebration of the release of their second album Oozevoodoo and their forthcoming headline tour throughout Australia in October, we rifle through the Webcuts June diaries to when we jumped in the backseat of The Scare tour van and rode shotgun as they hit the road to play a bunch of shows south of the border in support of Adelaide funk stoners Wolf & Cub. Interspersed within this piece are excerpts from an unpublished interview conducted with bassist Wade Keighran shortly after the recording of Oozevoodoo which talks about the state of the band after they returned from living in England and how they pulled themselves together from the proverbial brink of disaster.

“When we got home we landed with a thud, as always, but we got the blues that time pretty bad. It’s been rumoured that we nearly called time of death at Christmas 2007 and for a while there we just didn’t see each other. Our record had only come out in Oct/November. This was a record that to us was finished in January of that year and had been well and truly exorcised from our systems through a year of touring hard through England, Europe and the States before the fucking thing had even come out. We weren’t sick of it, we just felt the whole thing really anti-climactic. Nothing ever happened. It came out. We had already done the tours and that was it.”

It’s still dark when the van pulls up. Half of the band are already inside, barely conscious, barely moving. Kiss gets in, rugged up to the neck in black wool coat and looking ill. Bassist Wade Keighran looks even worse and the spectre of swine flu (then at its height) has everybody uncomfortable and wary of sitting too close. Seemingly prone to illness, Kiss is forced to ride shotgun up the front and the long 14 hour drive to Warrnambool, roughly 1200 km away begins. Everybody seems to burrow down into their pillows in their corner of the van and close their eyes. It’s just too damn early in the morning for anything else.  The first three hours are empty of mention, until a roadside piss break in the New South Wales countryside, where the band stand side by side like broken black fence posts encased in Cheap Monday jeans, precludes the van getting stuck axle deep in mud from a recent bout of rain that we could not shake free from.

“We did a rather unsuccessful national Australian tour in which we lost money and then went on an unscheduled hiatus just to remember why we are making music in the first place. We didn’t consciously decide to. We just cooled off in a big way. A total reassessment of priorities. It was the worst thing in the world to me at the time and we didn’t want it to happen, but it just died organically and then we weren’t a band for some time. We worked crappy jobs and played music on the side which is not something we were used to. For two and a half years all we did was tour and tour and play and play. We were burned, totally cooked.”

It’s the radio the entire way to Melbourne. The radio being the only thing that the band seem to agree on, only to deride the majority of what is heard. Jealousies and resentments are aired over the playlist. The coveted spot of ‘Album of the Week’ on Triple J is discussed. Currently this honour is bestowed to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest which after hearing the album in near entirety during the 14 hour drive, has yet to win me over. “Peaches” by The Stranglers elicits a “we should cover this” from Wade, which given the song’s identifiable chugging bassline seems like something a bass player would say. The Scare aren’t known  to add cover songs in their set, (apparently it has been done in the past), but the thought of them strangling The Stranglers most offensive track seems gleefully appropriate. The Stranglers strangling Grizzly Bear sounds even better.

“So from about December to March we didn’t really see each other as a band. We would hang out socially but it felt like the band was giving up the ghost so to speak. In March we did a tour supporting the Mess Hall which we thought would re-ignite some of the erection and change the face of our band and all that but we just played so badly that whole tour that we knew something had to give. I was freaking out, all that hard work, all that slow death on tour, the back breaking desperation of living on nothing but getting 25 mins a night to live the dream. All that man. It was just leaving us without saying goodbye. And we just couldn’t give a fuck even if we tried. It was daunting you dig?”

Half the van empties outside the hotel while the rest continue on to check out The Loft, a small nightclub-type venue that doubles as a live space. Things look grim when the first support band, Pets with Pets throw a tantrum about the sound, yet manage to leave everyone with ‘what the fuck was that’ looks on their faces. How we would come to love this band. To cut a short story even shorter, The Scare play a total of two songs at Warnnambool. After “Cyber Love”, a sleezy little ditty that didn’t make the cut for Oozevoodoo, Kiss mumbles into the microphone “Sorry, that’s it. My voice has gone” and walks off stage. The rest of the band look at each other, stunned. Wade offers anyone in the audience to come up and sing, but since it’s all new songs, I’m surprised if anyone but Kiss knows the words. Surprisingly, he comes back out for one more song, and then it’s over. 14 hours, 1200 kilometres, 2 songs. Thank you and good night.

“On the Mess Hall tour we played in Newcastle and instead of driving back to Sydney we decided to stay at Daniel Johns’ house and take a few days. Just to either totally relax or totally get our minds lost. Daniel’s house was perfect for that and for us at that time because he has a spare bedroom for each of us and a great vibe. I think the tour was over by that stage anyway so we didn’t have to be anywhere. We planned to stay a night or two and ended up staying for a week, Kiss stayed even longer. After the first few nights of just classic Scare debauchery, all that stuff you can think of, every bar we could crawl to, every shot we could chug, every anxiety in our minds slowly dissolved in our stomachs. All that dumb shit, we went off in a big way just to forget we’d been pushing death around.”

The 10am checkout is brutal, but we all pile back into the van and head off in search for breakfast. Warrnambool is beautiful in the daylight, blues skies and bright blue ocean. Pulling into the café, driver/right hand man Stevvy angles the van in too sharply and scrapes the car beside him. Everybody in the van starts screaming and further attempts to extract the van from the tight squeeze ends up in a loud scraping of metal on metal. People from the café come to investigate as the van door opens and The Scare spill out onto the street, empty beer trailing them, rattling into the gutter, Wade laughing “oh, this just gets better and better”. The cops quickly arrive on the scene and then disperse and The Scare shattered quiet is resumed. By the early afternoon, we’re in the fancy Vibe Hotel in Carlton with a few hours to kill before the show. Wade and I wander the streets, looking for something to eat, listening to him talk with envy about the studio work they did with Wendy James, ex-of Transvision Vamp. You couldn’t dream up such a pairing, but a Wendy James-fronted Scare doing Transvision Vamp songs is as close to Christmas to me than I care to admit.

Three cheers for Domino still giving its artists decent video budgets. Following upon Cass McComb’s beautifully shot, dark gem “The Executioner’s Song” is the second single from Wild Beasts’ sophomore album Two Dancers. Turning the idea of a pagan virgin sacrifice on its head, the lush cinematography compliments the entrancing shimmering groove for a beastly treat.

“Come off it now, what were you thinking?”

After one listen to Oozevoodoo you’d be confident in thinking that Chivalry, The Scare‘s debut album of 2007 was a bad dream best forgotten. Having spent a good year and change roughing it in Birmingham before heading back to Australia older and wiser, but tails firmly between their legs, Chivalry was a shambolic snapshot of a band seemingly at odds with themselves. A Shakespearean analogy dressed in black denim, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, Oozevoodoo is the album Chivalry should’ve been, but for The Scare to get where they are now, the trials and tribulations of the previous years were necessary to make the album everybody knew they were capable of.

A fortuitous meeting with Daniel Johns of Silverchair set the ball in motion, with Johns waving a minimalist wand, recording the band as live and clean sounding as possible. Here the songs have room to breathe, with vocalist Kiss Reid finally learning the meaning of restraint and the rock solid rhythm section of Samuel Pearton and Wade Keighran getting pushed to the front in what is very much a percussive, vibrant beast. Split into two sides, the first half of Oozevoodoo is sheer perfection. Razor-sharp pop songs rubbing shoulders with each other, from the jittery, strung out vibes of  “Could Be Bad” smack into the anthemic dole queue chant of “No Money”.

The sonic strength of first barrage of tracks gives the impression they’ve loaded the deck with the big hitters, but rolling straight into the boy-ish bravado of  “She Can’t Say No” and the snotty squeal of “I’m Desperate”, most of the tracks quickly love you and leave you, barely touching the 3 minute mark before the next tune rolls in like a slap in the face. One noticeable breakthrough on Oozevoodoo is the guitar mix, where instead of playing on top of each other like a pair of siamese guitarists, Brock Alexander and Liam O’Brien now strum noticeably different parts that drive the track, rather than demolish it. Be it down to Johns and engineer Chris Townend calling the shots or the band picking up their game, but The Scare themselves have never played or sounded better.

“As He Walks” is Oozevoodoo‘s hidden weapon. A slow-burning track straight out of the Bad Seeds swampland that would have Nick Cave wishing he could still write. Keighran’s stalking bassline weaving through the track like a snake in the grass. It’s only Kiss Reid’s no-battery-mobile-phone-blues (or whatever the fuck it’s about) on “Charger” that doesn’t hit the mark. For those lucky to have heard an earlier version of the record, we say “where’s Cyber Love?”, but rounding out with the loping swagger of “I Saw Destruction” and the shakedown chant of “Cry” with its self-fulfilling chorus “Who told you not to believe in yourself?”, The Scare sit down to eat a 5 course meal out of their own words and they do it in style.

It’s hard to be impartial when I love these guys. I couldn’t tell them I hated their first album, just like you can’t tell some proud parents their kid is gonna have a hard time making friends, but with Oozevoodoo, they’ve beaten the odds, beaten the doubters, grew a pair of balls and made a great fucking record. Now go out there and do something with it, ladies.

For a little while there, you couldn’t mention the name “Arctic Monkeys” without being doused with the excited spittle of a million critics, all of whom would try with the zeal of a hundred William Wallaces to convince you that not only were the Monkeys the best British band since the Beatles, but also had made one of the greatest British records ever. EVER. There wasn’t a indie music blogger who wasn’t heaping praises, Virgin radio could have been renamed “Arctic Monkeys Radio”, and NME even went so far as to call their debut record, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the “5th greatest British album of all time.”  ALL TIME.

This sort of hype can’t exist scientifically, however, without some sort of equal and opposite reaction, and that was evident both in the collective shoulder shrug of American audiences and the angry British listeners who thought the Monkeys praise was completely unfounded. As a result their second album became a polarizing sticking point, and the hoopla began to slowly fizzle out.

So now, the “love-em-or-hate-em” effect is in full force for their third effort, Humbug, which all things considered is really a shame. Front man Alex Turner’s got musical chops to spare, and the fussy, ebullient songs on the Monkeys first two albums really did him no favors. It was his energy, primarily, rather than his talent that was really on parade. And in fact, he showed a lot more of that prowess on the side project “The Last of the Shadow Puppets” than on anything the Monkeys had done. Until now.

Humbug is more melodic and polished than anything else in the short Arctic Monkeys’ catalog. Right out of the gate, “My Propeller” gallops forward with a Mission: Impossible-esque guitar line and Turner’s subdued vocals sounding much more new wave than punk. It creeps along with a Morrissey-like precision, only occasionally coming up for air with a blast of trademark Monkeys’ rock. This song clearly owes more to the faux-western Shadow Puppets’ sound than Arctic Monkeys, but it works completely in full rock band setting.

It’s here where Humbug separates itself from the older albums; most of the songs are about ten to twenty beats per minute slower, the music feels more carefully thought out, and there’s even room for some clever word play replacing the shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality of the past. It doesn’t have the kind of individual strengths that made “Mardy Bum” or “When The Sun Goes Down” such memorable songs, but the effort is consistent and makes the whole a lot more satisfying.

Of course, Humbug will never be considered the greatest of the Monkeys’ albums, and it won’t come close to being the most historic. But it does give Turner and co. a chance to hit the proverbial reset button and let the people who understandably rebelled against their supernatural hype come into their world. There’s a humanity here, a social realism, that was grossly overshadowed if not non-existent before. The honesty shines through: “She was close/Close enough to be your ghost/But my chances turned to toast/When I asked her if/I could call her yr name”. Hardly the words of a band who thinks it’s better than the Beatles.

I don’t know Paul Dempsey. In fact, I don’t even know that much about him, other than what I can glean from this record and the hardly reliable Wikiverse (which claims he’s married, plays in the band Something for Kate, and has perfect pitch). But, unqualified as I am to make any sort of statement regarding Mr. Dempsey’s character, I would bet a fair sum he’s something of a perfectionist.

Everything about Everything is True, Dempsey’s first album under his own name, is precise. It’s pristinely produced: thought was clearly given to every sound, tone, and timbre. The arrangements are democratic, with no instrument dominating or falling behind the rest. But, remarkably, Dempsey has kept this hi-fi indulgence from producing something mechanical. Like Spoon’s Britt Daniel, Dempsey knows when to keep it tight and when to let a stray sound in (see the last four seconds of “Ramona Was A Waitress”).

The lyrics, too, are intricately constructed. Each line flows elegantly into the next, a poetic spider web. “I’m just a name in a black book attached to a face/At the back of your memory’s window display,” Dempsey sings on “Fast Friends.” I never could have predicted where that line was going, and whatever I’d guessed, it wouldn’t have been half as pretty. Despite the vivid images, it’s generally impossible to know exactly what Dempsey’s talking about, but he’s so earnest it doesn’t really matter. The situation may be hazy, but the feeling is clear, and this makes the vagueness work. Take this line: “I know no quicker way, dear/To the shiny gates of Hell/Than a room full of handsome devils/Comparing everything to everything else.” That sentiment, to me, is perfectly clear, even though the people I’m thinking of probably aren’t the ones Dempsey was writing about. I don’t think it matters. The songs’ thoughts and themes are universal and beautifully stated, which is more than enough.

The record’s mood is painfully specific, but difficult to describe. Perhaps “hesitantly mournful.” It’s powerful, but difficult to take for forty-five minutes, which is the only thing stopping the album from being a great listen start-to-finish. There’s some relief, like the pop-punk jubilance of “The Great Optimist,” but the album gets weighted down in the middle, not by bad songs, but by heavy melancholy. But each taken on its own, there’s not a bad song on here, and that’s some feat.

Unlike the tone, the sound is impressively varied. Dempsey’s default setting is colourful, arty acoustic pop, somewhere between John Vanderslice’s Emerald City and Kevin Drew’s Spirit If…. He dances around the edges of that genre a lot, though: “Out The Airlock” is a looping folk ballad, and “Take Us To Your Leader” sounds remarkably like Ryan Adams circa Heartbreaker.

Paul Dempsey’s music isn’t for everyone, but it’s certainly for a lot of people. Even the harshest critics would be hard-pressed not to find something they liked, some flare of production or sharp turn of phrase. And Dempsey’s voice — world-worn and achingly resilient — is a thing from the roots of rock music, hardly original, but as appealing today as it was decades ago. It’s the kind of album that’s hard to recommend to fans of a certain genre, because it defines itself not by the type of music it is, but the nature of the songs themselves. So, hey, give it a shot.

Weeks away from delivering Oozevoodoo, their sopho-monster follow-up to 2007s Chivalry, our favourite itinerant, penniless urchins, The Scare tempt fate on “Could Be Bad”. Easily their best recording to date, “Could Be Bad” rails with strung-out guitars and percussive DT’s furthering a more groove-laden direction. With a video clip that is worthy of re-addressing our recent Australian Music Videos Top Ten, the band torture a hapless nine-to-fiver trying to get some peace and quiet. Look out for Oozevoodoo on September 7 through EMI and expect more treats from our favourite miscreants when Webcuts Oozes Voodoo throughout September.

On August 7, music fans will be having their own private deja-vu moment as the Dandy Warhols return from a time machine back to the year 2003 with a copy of an album they recorded then, but like “different, man”. The album is called Dandy Warhols Are Sound but it may as well be called Let’s Make You Buy The Album You Bought Before Again.

Around the time of the release of Welcome to the Monkey House, Courtney Taylor-Taylor (love this guy!) was bitching about how Capitol refused to let them put out the version they wanted to. High on the funny money they were making off the back of selling “Bohemian Like You” to Vodafone in the UK, Taylor-Taylor had grand visions for the next Dandy Warhols record, which landed somewhat short of the mark. Crafty guy that he was, he waited for the bad reviews to come in before throwing down against the big men. Various fans told him to put his money where his mouth was, and lo and behold came MP3′s of what was called Dandy Warhols Are Sound, but it was a kinda under-the-table-secret-handshake deal. You had to know someone who knew someone and you had to have a computer.

…Are Sound was only cosmetically different from the released version, at least from memory and my copy has long since been surrendered to the great hard disk graveyard in the sky. Welcome to the Monkey House was to be a change in direction for the band, enlisting Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes to come play with them in the studio, hoping to channel their out-dated muse, but …Monkey House was an electro groove record searching for a Studio 54 that no longer existed. It’s hard to believe that was in 2003. In 2009 things still don’t fare much better now as they did then. They’ve probably tinkered with it a little since the grubby little fanbase got a hold of it, but who knows, maybe …Monkey House was an unrecognized classic and will critically revive the career of these Portland stoners. Or maybe the world will collectively yawn and go back to tweeting on their iPhones.

Still, they at least got something right and resequenced the album, putting the monster dub beast, Clash “Straight to Hell” stealing, “Burned” in as the opening track. “The Last High” (a.k.a. “The Last Great Dandy Warhols Song”) flies unfettered, longer than the original and more Bowie than ever. Some of these songs still give me cold shivers at night though; “Plan A”, “Scientist” etc, no matter how much you pimp and pout and shout “damn The Man!”, sometimes The Man knows best. Anyway, Michael Jackson’s dead, Courtney. Where’s the cover of “Blackbird” you touted you would do on the original version of  ”Welcome to the Monkey House”, huh??

Tracklisting

01. Burned
02. Scientist
03. We Used To Be Friends
04. The Last High
05. Wonderful You
06. The Dandy Warhols Love Almost Everyone
07. I Am Over It
08. Heavenly
09. Plan A
10. Rock Bottom
11. I Am Sound
12. Insincere Because I
13. Pete International Spaceport

Out on EMI Records (Australia), August 7.