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Welcome to the Monkey House

by The Dandy Warhols

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The Dandy Warhols’ fourth album arrives with a cover that melds Sticky Fingers and The Velvet Underground and Nico. One therefore assumes that leader Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s claim that predecessor Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia was "the last classic rock album" was a bit tongue-in-cheek. (Actually, one had assumed that already.) Reversing rock’s usual guitars-front-keyboards-as-filigree, Monkey House takes the Dandys into a challenging sphere while remaining undeniably organic sounding. The band and co-producers Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran and Tony Visconti (Low, Electric Warrior) have built elaborate but never stifling arrangements of these songs--check out the way guest Nile Rodgers’s rhythm guitar part subtly funks up the last minute of "Scientist," or how the group makes the pulsing "(You Come In) Burned" perhaps the best yet of its trademark trancelike album closers. Taylor-Taylor continues to display growing self-knowledge in his "words of comic wisdom": "I Am Sound" isn’t a declaration of aural omniscience, but a simple affirmation of OK-ness, while "The Last High" dissects the end of a high-style love affair. Miss this and miss one of the year’s finest rock & roll records. --Rickey Wright