Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia (2000)

THE drugs were still in effect, as evidenced by the darkly woozy Horse Pills, but Thirteen Tales is a far more focused effort than its predecessors. The psychedelic tinges come through in a catchy collection of mid-tempo head-bobbers that hide their dark themes with dreamy melodies, such as the trumpet-tinged Godless, the lethargic Sleep, sprawling East-meets-West epic Mohammed, faux-spiritual The Gospel and the fuzzed-out riff of Nietzsche. But the wry wit of Courtney Taylor-Taylor's ego comes through in some up-tempo pop gems, such as the Beatles-ish Cool Scene, the jangly bop of Get Off and the sarcastic smash-hit Bohemian Like You. It's a stunningly simple but effective album and their career high-point to date.

Welcome To The Monkey House (2003)

TAKING it's name from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, this album saw synthesisers replace a lot of the guitars and the psychedelic jams, dragging the Dandys' sound out of the '60s and '70s and into the '80s. Picking Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes as producer made it a deliberate move, and while the bold new direction alienated some fans, the fact is this is a cool album. Taylor-Taylor's new-found falsetto sparkles in intergalactic groover Plan A and hit single We Used To Be Friends, which is another fine example of Taylor-Taylor's ability to slide his sense of humour into a nifty pop tune, much like on Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth and Bohemian Like You. David Bowie sneaks in to replace The Beatles and The Velvet Underground on the key influence list, particularly on I Am A Scientist (which samples Fashion), the synth-slink of I Am Over It, and the Evan Dando co-write You Were The Last High (which borrows heavily from Ashes To Ashes).

Odditorium Or Warlords Of Mars (2005)

WITH the money they got licensing Bohemian Like You to Vodafone for commercial use, The Dandy Warhols bought The Odditorium - a recording and film studio for them and their creative friends to use, not unlike their namesake Andy Warhol's Factory. Like much that came out of The Factory, Odditorium... is an unfocused and overly druggy mess. Where they had once created cruisey psychedelic wig-outs, there was now noisy directionless facsimiles such as Love Is The New Feel Awful, Easy and A Loan Tonight. The only hints of a tune can be found on Smoke It and All The Money Or The Simple Life, Honey?, both of which were written by Taylor-Taylor and Fastball's Mike Zuniga.

Many critics raved that it was a return to form, except for taste-making music site Pitchfork, which declared it ``an album of second-hand decadence, of hand-me-down self-destruction'' on which the band ``promptly shoot themselves in both feet''.

...Earth To The Dandy Warhols... (2008)

EARTH starts off worryingly like Odditorium... - making the title rather apt - with the directionless and noisy The World The People Together (Come On) and the drab Mission Control. Fortunately it picks up from there as the Bowie of ...Monkey House returns with a hint of Iggy Pop and Talking Heads on the stoned orgy soundtrack Welcome To The Third World. It gets even better as they dabble in some early rock 'n' roll sounds (The Legend Of The Last Of The Outlaw Truckers...), Beach Boys-ish pop (Mis Amigos) and some classic Dandy's fuzz-rock on (Wasp In The Lotus, And Then I Dreamt Of Yes and Now You Love Me). Unfortunately there are two more boring psych-outs to punctuate the record but most of this is a genuine return-to-form.