The Dandy Warhols @ The Tivoli, Brisbane – 31 May 2011 – Live Review

Review By: Denis Semchenko


[Photo Credit: Stuart Blythe]
  The Dandy Warhols: the post-grunge band who never knew how to take themselves seriously and were ultimately never really taken seriously by the listeners. It was cool to like them. As someone born on the cusp of two different generations (X and Y), I’ve witnessed their heyday first-hand during my late teens and early twenties, while the number of copyists they spawned (the majority of them disappearing almost as soon as they popped up) is quite remarkable. Sure, we’ve all got a soft spot

for simple, catchy ditties like Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth and Bohemian Like You – however most of us have since grown up, whereas the band members themselves have merely got older.

With these thoughts floating through my head, I’m standing at the back of the sold-out Tivoli as the Portland quartet raise the first of tonight’s cheer blasts with the opening Be-In. The initial batch of numbers – including the aforementioned Junkie, We Used To Be Friends and finest moment The Last High – makes me believe this is a considerably better show than the DiG!-immortalised former friends/nemeses The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s disappointingly tepid 2010 display. To his credit, the considerably less lithe-looking Courtney Taylor-Taylor (who later turns in a decent solo performance of slacker anthem Every Day Should Be A Holiday) is a fairly gregarious frontman – he even comes across as a … genuinely nice dude. Cap-sporting guitarist Peter Holmstrom is still a “shoegazer” par excellence and keyboardist/percussionist Zia McCabe – arguably the inventor of the modern-day “chick-with-tambourine” phenom – looks like she’s having the most fun.

Much like the indie-rockers’ 2008 and 2010 Brisbane gigs (respectively here at The Tiv and at Parklife), this is a “greatest hits” show, played safe. Inevitably, it’s the songs from Thirteen Tales Of Urban Bohemia that prompt the biggest reaction and sound the best, whereas the patchy post-2003 material chronicles the band recycling themselves. Eleven years on, the ubiquitous Brown Sugar rewrite remains a snappy “scene” pisstake (the “so what do you do? Oh yeah, I wait tables too” verse has since defined pretty much every inner-city hipster on the planet) and it is singularly hard to resist yelling jaunty “who-hoo-hoo!”-s at the top of your voice to the cod-Keith Richards riff. Get Off retains some potent ‘cowboy’ twang, but the “vocal brass” in Godless doesn’t make up for that trumpet hook and the fuzzed-up Horse Pills doesn’t have that much of a kick.



They may have looked as dead-sexy as their cherished band in their prime, but tonight, 35-plus year-old Gen X-ers with houses and careers merrily jumping and singing along to Junkie like it’s 1997 all over again make for a rather sad sight. Towards the end, the drone-y early cut Boys Better manages to showcase some of the Dandys’ real psych-rock groove, but still fails to convey the “don’t-give-a-fuck” spirit of old. After the show, my friend and fellow X/Y-er sums it up thusly: “Dandy Warhols, we used to be friends, but lately you just haven’t been trying at all.” I might also add that, like they sing, they were never more than a casual, easy thing to begin with.

Artists: The Dandy Warhols
Venue: The Tivoli, Brisbane
Date: May 31st, 2011
Review By: Denis Semchenko


VIEW FULL PHOTO GALLERY – CLICK HERE


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