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Review & Setlist: The Dandy Warhols seemed stuck in middle gear. Then the show broke.
A mid-show glitch seemed to energize the hazy alt-rock stalwarts at Royale Tuesday night.
The Dandy Warhols, with Sisters Of Your Sunshine Vapor, at Royale, Tuesday, March 5
Ever since their 1995 debut “Dandys Rule OK,” the Dandy Warhols have always projected a self-satisfied loucheness in both their songs and their image. Sometimes that can come off as insular, pretentious and smug, even disdainful of effort and sincerity. But it can also fuel a vibe, lulling listeners with a soft, seductive blur, and at Royale on Tuesday, the band wrapped its audience in a sonic blanket that had an almost narcotic warmth at times.
Blessed/cursed with much the same vocal intonations as the Kinks’ Ray Davies, frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor had a similar archness, only instead of pining for a long-lost England of yore, he was glamorizing the too-smart-for-their-own-good crowd that keeps sinking into their own trouble. He carried himself with a full-body sneer that led the band through sardonic songs like “We Used To Be Friends” and “Crack Cocaine Rager,” where it was unclear whether the “Born On The Bayou” guitar riff was inserted sarcastically or not.
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Elsewhere, the Dandy Warhols seemed to stubbornly, if fully intentionally, resist turning up the temperature too much. The songs — which included three agreeable cuts from their upcoming “Rockmaker” album — remained strictly within the mid-tempo zone, turning it up or down a tick as necessary, and the instruments all seemed to be suffused with a haze.
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Brent DeBoer drummed with a wide-eyed grin through much of “Bohemian Like You,” and keyboardist Zia McCabe was nearly always moving, throwing her hair around during “Boys Better” and shaking maracas or a tambourine with her free hand for most of the performance.
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But even with one microphone devoted to his low murmur and one to more straightforward singing, Taylor-Taylor wasn’t an especially demonstrative vocalist, with a heart rate that even a song as beachy as “Be Alright” couldn’t seem to raise. And guitarist Peter Holmström largely remained in the shadows, which nonetheless couldn’t prevent him from squeezing out a rubbery lead during the solo to “Good Morning.”
That seemed to put a ceiling on what the Dandy Warhols could do, as if there was a filter over their efforts. With its Stonesy guitar chug and a chorus-punctuating “Woo!” that the audience eagerly joined in on, it was easy to imagine a version of “Bohemian Like You” that blew the doors off the place, but it was a coolly simmering buzz instead.
Some songs capitalized on that quite nicely, like “Arpeggio Adaggio,” which was like George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah” but draggier and druggier. The juxtaposition of the verse (with its strummed chorus that stretched to the horizon and Taylor-Taylor’s chewing-gum vocals) and a chorus that was practically whispered by contrast gave “I Love You” a dynamism most of the others didn’t aim for. And even that was before it started throbbing and slowing down, with a dub-like echo hitting DeBoer’s drums and the band opening up into soaring space psychedelia for longer than the part of the song that had preceded it.
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And then the show broke. Some technical glitch or other cleared the stage of everyone but Taylor-Taylor, who announced “We’ve gotta fix that. Zia’s gonna hit the head.” As the crew fiddled with the equipment, the suddenly solo singer played “Welcome To The Monkey House” and began “Not Your Bottle” with slow strums before the rest of the band rejoined one by one, and the timing of each addition served the song so effectively that it was as if it was how it had always been meant to be played.
That song, which Taylor-Taylor said hadn’t been played in 20 years, became the pivot point for the whole concert, invigorating the band at a point in the night when they might have hit a wall. (Either that or the tech crew’s fix was just that good.) “You Were The Last High” wasn’t substantially different from anything else they’d already played, but the focus was sharper.
By their closing run of the deliberate and heavy-footed “Godless,” “Bohemian Like You,” the swirling instrumental “Pete International Airport” and the glam churn of “Boys Better,” it wasn’t clear that the Dandy Warhols were still doing much of anything. But they were doing it with command.
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Playing with a similar muted, edgeless aggression, Detroit trio Sisters Of Your Sunshine Vapor opened with droning, semi-chaotic space rock marked by distant, echoey guitars and agitated drums.
Setlist for The Dandy Warhols at Royale, March 5, 2024
- Ride
- I’d Like To Help You With Your Problem
- We Used To Be Friends
- Crack Cocaine Rager
- Danzig With Myself
- Plan A
- Be Alright
- The Summer Of Hate
- I Love You
- Welcome To The Monkey House
- Not Your Bottle
- You Were The Last High
- Good Morning
- Arpeggio Adaggio
- Holding Me Up
- Godless
- Bohemian Like You
- Pete International Airport
- Boys Better
Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
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