Oh yes, very clever. The Dandy Warhols are one of those bands who've always worked terribly hard to let us know how smart and urbane they are.
For years, the Portland quartet might have sounded like a bunch of jelly-spined Home Counties shoegazers. But the aura of debauchery they affected made them seem so much more interesting: who cares if they sound like Ride when the singer is saying something jaded about heroin and the keyboard player has her breasts out?
Of course, sceptics might question the truly Bohemian credentials of a band crass enough to call their third album '13 Tales From Urban Bohemia'. But there's always been something annoyingly likeable about this ragged bunch of posers, provocateurs and self-mythologisers. Not quite as bright and subversive as they think they are, but still a good deal brighter and more subversive than most bands who achieve success thanks to one of their tunes being used on an advert.
The reliably perverse news about 'Welcome To The Monkey House' is that nothing on it sounds remotely like the Rolling Vodaphones pastiche of 'Bohemian Like You'. Nevertheless, The Dandy Warhols' fourth album is by some distance their most commercially sneaky. Out go the washes of flanged guitar, the hazy signifiers of indie credibility. And in sails Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes as producer to apply glistening synths and St Tropez sheen.
It's a cunning move by Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the Dandys' excruciatingly self-aware singer and guitarist. For here's the '80s revival long plotted by style journalists given an accessible alt-rock face, a deftness missing from most of the arid purveyors of sexy robot music. Taylor has many talents beyond giving seditious quotes and looking like a model, and quite a useful one is to write enormously catchy tunes in a slightly offhand way, which he does to great effect on 'We Used To Be Friends' and 'I Am A Scientist'.
Another is to sound warm and hazy in the middle of stereotypically chill music. Taylor still writes addictive, ebbing dronepop, so that the lovely 'Plan A' is at its core not all that different from one of his old songs like 'Godless', for all the 'Scary Monsters And Super Creeps' atmospherics. Bowie, in fact, is a much stronger influence on 'Welcome To The Monkey House' than Duran Duran: two of Bowie's old producers, Tony Visconti and Nile 'Chic' Rodgers, are involved here as well as Rhodes.
It's a guest from a less glamorous world who makes the most telling contribution, though. The outstanding 'You Were The Last High' was co-written with the defiantly unglossy Evan Dando and proves that, for all the raised eyebrows and sucked-in angles, the snarky namedropping that sees Wire, Elastica and Jacko mentioned within the album's first minute, there's something rather human lurking just beneath The Dandy Warhols' polished new surfaces. A heart, some might say. But perhaps that's too soppy for this studiously unsentimental, confusingly good bunch of chancers.
