The Dandy Warhols Are Too Catchy

First things first, this is not at all a knock on The Dandy Warhols. Recently they’ve been one of my favorite bands to listen to and they have made a lot of great music.

Great is one thing, but catchy is another. For example, “Harvest” by Neil Young is, in my opinion, a great song. However, I never wake up in the morning to find it ingrained in my head. On the other hand, I’m not a big “Call Me Maybe” fan, but if I ever get transported back to 2012 and hear it again, it’ll be in my head for a while. Now, I’m sure what is catchy to me will not always be catchy to others, but at least in my opinion, The Dandy Warhols have a ton of really, really catchy songs.

If you know The Dandy Warhols, I would assume it’s because of their song “Bohemian Like You." That’s a catchy song in its own right and is one of my favorites. After coming across both it and “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth,” I decided to do a deep dive into their discography and it was, dare I say, dandy.

A bit about The Dandy Warhols: they’re an alt-rock band that formed in 1994. Their lead singer goes by Courtney Taylor-Taylor (he was born Courtney A. Taylor), so that’s something. The band name is based on the pop artist Andy Warhol. They’ve released albums fairly consistently and are still going strong.

Now, perhaps I’m just overly dramatic, but I actually had to delete a Dandy Warhols song from my playlist because it was too catchy. Whenever I heard it, it would stick in my head for a long, long time and there was nothing I could do to get it out. Another issue was that I couldn’t really understand all of the lyrics, so in my head, I wanted to sing along with the song, but I couldn’t, which really bugged me. I could have just read over the lyrics a few times and memorized them, but at that point, I was annoyed. So, “Cool Scene” was taken off of my playlist. Fair? Not really. I have like ten other songs of theirs on that playlist though, so I think it's okay.

What makes “Cool Scene” so catchy? For me, it couldn’t have been the lyrics, since I only picked up bits and pieces of them in my first few listens. So, we’re faced with the instrumentals. Mainly, it’s that guitar riff. It’s repeated a lot and there are many points where it is featured in the foreground, making it stick out in the song and get stuck in my head. The melody of the riff also matches the melody of the verses, which again adds to that repetitive aspect.

Going through their discography, I’ll say this: The Dandy Warhols can write riffs. These riffs are simple enough to be easy to remember while also being really pleasing to the ear, and I think that is the biggest strength of the band. This is audible in “Bohemian Like You” (with a guitar riff so simple that even I can play it...with a capo, but still), “All The Money or The Simple Life Honey (with a cool trumpet riff), “The Dandy Warhols Love Almost Everyone” (this one uses a very “pure” keyboard sound), “Boys Better” (which features a two for one, first a guitar riff then one on the keyboard, both catchy), and Styggo (catchy guitar part, but the “riff” created by the doo-doo-dooing helps a lot as well and is more prominent).

There’s also something with the drums that I really like in a lot of their songs, but I lack the technical knowledge to make heads or tails of what exactly it is, so I think I’ll just leave this post as it is and try to get “Cool Scene” out of my head.