Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia

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"I wear my influences like a f***ing badge," proclaims lead singer-songwriter Courtney Taylor regarding Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia. But while the Dandy Warhols liberally steal Rolling Stones riffs, Iggy Pop vocals, Britpop sonic surfing, and even Burt Bacharach horn sections, they give it back in spades, delivering one of the best rock albums of 2000: a masterpiece of sex, beauty, strife, and wry, raunchy-cool attitude. --Beth Massa

The long hiatus that led to the Dandy Warhols' masterful third album, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, promoted leaps-and-bounds growth in this already excellent band's music. Layers, layers, and more layers of guitars coexist here with trippy soundscapes, doot-doo-doo choruses, and even an eyebrow-cocked nod to hip-hop ("Yo, bitch," frontman Courtney Taylor mutters, sounding like Lou Reed reading an Ice Cube lyric sheet). By turns galloping, propulsive, hushed, and majestic, this is music that openly steals--from the Stones, Kinks, and Cars, among others--while fusing its sources into a unique whole of its own. Taylor lives up to the wide-screen promise of the disc's title, offering a series of what Game Theory once called "pointed accounts of people you know." The characters here brag about how they "got a beautiful new Asian girlfriend" ("Solid"), live the bicoastal high life in "itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny ridin'-up-your-butt bikini[s]" ("Horse Pills"), seek reassurance that an affair is "just a casual, casual, easy thing" ("Bohemian Like You"), and offer advice in the middle of a breakup argument: "Hey, man, turn that shit off." Seedily glamorous and replete with the best vocal asides since Jarvis Cocker let it bleed all over Pulp's Different Class, Thirteen Tales will convince you that rock is alive--and that you should still care. --Rickey Wright