Dandy Warhols look back to go forward

The Dandy Warhols are big on hooks, vacant stares in press photos, Lou Reed and looking way better than you.

As for connective tissue?

Not so much.

Guitarist Peter Holmstrom elaborates.

Sort of.

"I remember as a kid reading some magazine where they had a section where they got bands to review the latest singles," he begins. "If it was a heavy metal band, they were always dissing on the pop music, ‘Ahh, pop music, it’s so easy to write, anybody could do that. But what we do is special.’ And then the pop bands would come and do the exact same thing, but in reverse. That whole thing kind of stuck in my head, ‘Well, I guess it’s all easy to do.’ "

He laughs.

He continues.

"Songs are songs," Holmstrom notes matter-of-factly, as if stating some self-evident truth. "You can record them any way you want. You can make a country song out of anything, if you wanted to — add a slide guitar, a banjo. Why not?"

He repeats the thought for emphasis. "Why not?"

Those two words are a pretty decent encapsulation of The Dandy Warhols’ prime operating principle over the past 17 years.

The band’s latest release, the best-of collection "The Capitol Years 1995-2007," attests to as much.

It’s a catchy catch-all of the Portland, Ore., band’s four major label albums.

There’s dreamy, trancelike psychedelia with simmering horns and breathy vocals from frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor ("Godless"), electro-fired, falsetto-flecked New Wave ravers ("We Used to Be Friends"), snide, catchy, self-aware power pop ("Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth") and an another dozen diffuse tracks that only loosely touch on some of the band’s artistic impulsiveness, which manifests itself in everything from a full-on, backwoods country twang to greasy garage rock.

With their first career retrospective in hand, it’s clear that it’s been a long and twist-filled road for the Dandys thus far, one that’s seen them go from next-big-thing status at the tail end of the ’90s alt-rock boom to platinum sales abroad to their current status: occasionally squabbling survivors who’ve found a measure of hard-fought peace amongst themselves.

"I had a big realization this year," Holmstrom says. "We had a bunch of time off in the early part of the year because Courtney and his wife had a kid, so there was some downtime, and we all kind of went a little stir crazy. I kind of figured out that there’s no real reason for the four us to ever be in the same room except when we’re playing music. That’s the thing that keeps us together. And it’s a special thing. It’s just undeniable. And I think that once we started touring that the others realized it, too."

Still, Holmstrom readily admits that there have been times when he questioned whether or not the Dandys would make it through it all.

"There was a moment a few years ago where I kind of thought that maybe the band was going away," he says.

But they’ve managed to push on in the same way they push against the bounds of their sound from one record to the next.

And while Holmstrom acknowledges that he’s been reflecting on the past a bit in wake of the band’s greatest hits collection, it’s also reaffirmed a once-tenuous future.

"We’re tooling around with either going extremely electronic or old-school rock ‘n’ roll/country," Holmstrom says of the direction the band is heading for its next album, which is still in the planning stages. "And then there’s also the idea that we should make a record the way we make a record and not try and put anything on it ahead of the process."

He pauses.

"We’ll probably get some combination of all three."

Yeah, probably.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.