The Dandy Warhols

★★★ Why You So Crazy DINE ALONE. CD/DL/LP

Courtney Taylor-Taylor insists: “People are losing their minds.”

Typically eclectic, off-kilter and irreverent, the Dandys’ tenth studio album reflects a world gone “batshit crazy” – hence ironic country/gospel mashups Highlife and Sins Are Forgiven preach licence to err. Terraform, meanwhile, seems to imagine interplanetary exodus, its neat analogue synth hook and heavily-treated vocals a claustrophobic trip as we journey “into the void”. The playful lampooning of classic US song-forms continues on Motor City Steel (imagine Giorgio Moroder retooling John Cougar’s Jack & Diane), and the cruel, Velvets-like skewering of parochial apathy that is Small Town Girls. The sense of a band doing whatever the hang they want and to hell with any unified direction is cemented by instrumental closer Ondine, six minutes of florid, Mike Garson-like piano that would perfectly soundtrack a silent comedy about the decline of Western civilisation.