Capitol
2003
Welcome To The Monkey House
About This Album
Over the course of their career, the Dandy Warhols alternated between slick, smart, slightly smirky pop singles like "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" and "Bohemian Like You" and the ambitious yet somehow empty-sounding tracks that made up the rest of their albums. With their fifth album, Welcome to the Monkey House, the band capitalizes on their pop sensibilities and even manages to turn their prior weaknesses into strengths, resulting in a collection of gloriously blank, cleverly stupid neo-new wave songs. It's true that, once again, the Dandy Warhols look to other people's music for direction, but this time around, the new wave and synth-pop revivals that inform the album sound so natural that it's hard to imagine the band in any other incarnation. Welcome to the Monkey House's glossy mix of synths, guitars, and drum machines -- aided and abetted by co-producer Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran -- are the perfect complement to Courtney Taylor's knowing, flip outlook. The album gets off to a strong start with sharply crafted songs like "We Used to Be Friends" -- which feels a little bit like a follow-up to Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia's "Bohemian Like You" -- and "I Am Over It," a slice of electronic pop that's delivered in appropriately blasé, mechanical fashion.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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