The Musical Ingenuity of the Dandy Warhols

Since the mid-1990s, the Dandy Warhols have created the kind of music that has always been ahead of its time.

"We always want to push ourselves to try something different so each record there's always a few things we want to do and we usually pull it off," said the Warhols' guitarist, Peter Loew. "I think it's true more with this record than any others in the past just because the goals were much further off than last time."

Amidst the height of yet another surge in garage rock, the Dandy Warhols recently switched gears on its latest work, entitled "Welcome to the Monkey House" (2003, Capitol Records). The band altered its trademark style, often described as a wall of sound, to pop-synth melodies balanced with acoustic and electric studio tracks.

"It seems like most of the bands these days are either going in one direction or the other, I think," said Loew. "It's something like the straight-up garage rock, very simple late 1960s production; or there's the other extent all Pro Tools, all digital. We always try and do one thing and it doesn't always work for the whole record so we try and mix things up just to get what we want to make the song work."

Under the production tutelage of Duran Duran's founder, Nick Rhodes, and Tony Visconti (David Bowie), the Dandy Warhols recorded its new album at its home studio in Portland, Ore.; New York City; and London, England. Warhols' singer, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, took the helm as songwriter with credits on every song on the album.

"Nick we brought in originally just to play keyboards on the song 'You Were the Last High.' When we got that back, we were really happy with it. We just sent him some more stuff and ended up going over to London to work with him for a couple of weeks," said Loew. "He did enough for us to think he deserved co-producing credit. We wanted to actually try and have a well-produced record."

The band put together the entire record using the computer program called Pro Tools to create expansive layers of synthesized sounds over engaging and artsy harmonic structures and melodies.

"We tend to set a few goals such as trying to keep it really open and have a lot of space as opposed to what we've done in the past," said Loew. "We always started with Courtney putting down rough guitar chords and vocal bits, and then we sort of doubled and tripled over it by just starting to play."

Another Duran Duran member, Simon LeBon, lent his voice to the song "You Were the Last High." Nile Rodgers, guitarist of the band Chic, also donated his talent to the project.

"There's absolutely nothing here that's a first take on this record and using Pro Tools was a new experience for us," explained Loew. "Everything was chopped around since nothing is permanent in Pro Tools. You can move anything anywhere. If you don't like the placement of the verse, chorus, bridge or anything, you can just move it around until it feels right so it's definitely a strange way of working. In the past, we would play the song a few times and figure the arrangement out first."

The Dandy Warhols feature Taylor-Taylor on guitar and vocals, Loew on guitar, Brent DeBoer on drums, and Zia McCabe on bass and keyboards.