DING! LOGAN LYNN JOINS THE DANDY’S NEW LABEL!
It’s easy to figure why most music critics—even, especially ‘community’ obsessed northwest writers (our own very much included)—trash the Dandy Warhols. They specialize in infectious, lyrically-available, immediately-explicable pop rendering the critic’s job rather beside the point. They freely admit the quality of drugs and sex partners available to rock stars to be perks of the job. Most damning, they’re a singles band. Had they the good sense to put out a dozen 45s in 1967 and record a series of majestically-condescending interviews to fawning magazines before well-timed overdoses, we’d all be lighting candles (or, likely, other things) upon Taylor-Taylor Street each year.
As is, despite the mountain of press CTT* spends detailing the glories of his hometown to the international press, they are locally considered from Portland but not of Portland. Too careerist (which makes no sense). Too haughty (ever talk up Janet Weiss?). Too attractive (perhaps, but their unending advertisement for NW glam have buffered the ranks). Too…happy? Confident in their powers? Unabashed in their desire to change the town, or, at least, their little quarter, towards a well-articulated vision of…I know, I know, but there’s no other phrase…urban Bohemia? Put simply, they’ve never sought to Keep Portland Weird or indulge a Malkmusian sense of artist-in-residence at riverside village. The mission statement’s been there from the beginning, but, now, the Dandy’s have built their compound, imported allies, and started a label.
Following themselves and next week’s concert openers the Upside Down, Logan Lynn becomes the third artist to be signed to Beat The World Records. A dayglo electro performer, Lynn’s ecstatic intelligence and untempered glee through two EPs and LOGO-rotated videos resembles a sweaty Postal Service capable of inelegant emotions or The Pet Shop Boys were they sorta hot and born to the civil unions generation—”Ring Around,” for an artist whose press protests (wrongly) he “brings the ‘mo back to emo,” tackles proposals absent politics. CTT’s set to produce his debut full-length From Pillar To Post (and, we hope, counsel against Lynn’s cap choices) early next year and, one expects, set dancefloors thumping worldwide.
Read the rest of this entry »
