I’m starting this new year off with a post about The Dandy Warhols, which strangely seems reasonably appropriate, in a way. They’re one of those ’90s bands that’s still kind of underrated and underexposed, you could say, with Soul Coughing, on the other hand, having recently graduated to the realm of “trendy,” and so no longer a relative dark horse. The Dandy Warhols called Portland home before it was the chic locale of an HBO show, and, while it’s certainly not inconceivable that they were immersed in some drug culture, the lyrical themes stay relatively “clean,” and wholesome, on this album, some promiscuous sex and existential malaise notwithstanding, just to make things authentic.
There’s even a song about high school on here, a fact maybe not as much telling to its artistic credibility as it is amusing, given the proclivity of young people to migrate to these bands 20 years post facto, and rightly so. I myself got into them when I was 18, finishing up my senior year before college, and found the lyrical subject matter just racy enough while also hauntingly real, on tracks like “Godless”; “Sleep” and “Cool Scene”; each of which at least temporarily abandon comedy and issue some straight-to-the-dome lyrical mourning.
In some Rolling Stone interview, I think, leading up to the release of To the 5 Boroughs, the Beastie Boys described three “islands” of content into which each of the album’s tunes fell. It was something like politics, battle rap and goof-offs, I think. If we were to attempt to do this with the songs on Bohemia, I don’t think three islands would even be enough, but it might be fun to, anyway. “Godless”; the excellent, tense and gloomy opener, plays as, generally, grunge melancholia, not miles removed from Soul Asylum or Radiohead, in basic disposition. The second track, “Mohammed”; right away with the presence of bongos and strange, sitar-like sounds that seem borne in the Eastern hemisphere, issues a more eccentric ambience, creating a tragically appropriate sort of foreign, arcane sonic backdrop for Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s likely delusional declamation of “I only wanna do the right thing / But all these demons harrass my soul”. The warbly, undulating guitar sound marks the track as far more psychedelic than the heavily acoustic opener, “Godless.”
“Nietzsche” summons in heavy, fuzzy electric guitar chords, simple as they are in tonal interface, pairing them, then, with what as far as I can tell is a sort of existentially addled, comedic attempt at recreating a motif of a late, famous philosopher. “Country Leaver” is a folky goof-off about going on a gay vacation. Ok, I think our “island” plan is already abandoned, at this point.
From there, anyway, just to make things short, you’ve got naive, ephemeral joy (“Solid”); relationship-related bitterness (“Horse Pills”); melancholic introspection (“Get off”; “Sleep”; “Big Indian”); more vague stabs at comedy rock (“Cool Scene”; “Bohemian Like You”; “Shakin’”); and then, finally, in the disarming album closeur, a legitimate assemblage toward spiritual healing. The emotional scope of this album is utterly staggering to behold and its enjoyment level is bolstered further by what’s obviously the band’s kid-in-a-candy-shop approach to accumulating auxiliary, eccentric styles, and sequencing an LP that seems to authoritatively redefine “variety” on an alternative rock album.
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