The Dandy Warhols’ fifth record is named, in part, after their recording studio, and that sense of world-weary insularity hangs over every note. Both more cohesive and more coherent than 2003’s glassy-eyed, ragged-tiger redux Welcome To The Monkey House, the new Odditorium Or Warlords Of Mars (Capitol) recalls the blown-out blues of Beggars Banquet, a record not so much made for reveling as it is for the next-day hangover. They’re coming down, so you’d better get this party finished: tempos crawl, Courtney Taylor sings in whispers and croaks, and the guitars are as brittle and creaky as old wagon wheels. There’s a palpable sense of exhaustion, from Taylor’s cracked-larynx announcement that “the simple life honey, is good” on the sham-glam anthem “All The Money Or The Simple Life Honey” to the atonal 12-minute attack of the drones “A Loan Tonight.” It’s the same kind of wheezy dilapidation Blur attempted on 13, but instead of sounding stylized and over-thought, the Dandies sound genuinely burned-out. Even the ostensible single “Smoke It” (itself a refitting of Blur’s “Song 2,” complete with “woo-hoo!”s) feels bleary, the sound of a band trying to drag their tired bodies through one final huzzah. After burning 10 years on some misguided mission to save rock, the Dandys seem to have discovered the sweet release of giving up. So much the better—it’s fun to be a flunky, and heroism’s so passé.

MAGNET cornered Taylor at the Odditorium to ask about his new lease on life.

On your last record, you pursued an ’80s-revival aesthetic, and yet it did almost nothing for you in terms of sales. Now bands like the Killers are making huge strides with almost the exact same formula. Is it hard not to get resentful?
Yeah, but two years after (2000’s) Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia came out, the Strokes and the White Stripes and the Vines broke through and “brought rock back.” I guess we just get bored a little sooner than everyone else does and we move on to the next thing. But I think that because of how much airplay we get in commercials and movie soundtracks and TV shows, it does have an effect on what’s in the ears of the industry people. It takes a couple of years, but we definitely make an effect. We slightly alter the course of what is determined to be an acceptable commercial sound.

Just by being present in these other, nontraditional formats?
Exactly. In places where our name is not attached to it. I mean, we’re a great tool for filmmakers. We get to do whatever the fuck we want. There are no big deals going on around the Dandy Warhols as far as payola for radio. No one’s “broken” us yet, but we all own houses, we own a quarter of a city block where we have film productions, graphic design, Web design—everything we want.

Are you at a level where you’re comfortable with that being the high point of your career? With never getting the worldwide visibility and recognition?
If I could keep it just like this forever, that would be super great. I’d be beside myself!

I ask because a lot of that attitude is reflected in the record, especially in the song “All The Money Or The Simple Life Honey.”
And you know, this is really all a person could reasonably want in this world. You want to hobnob with other great artists all the time, and you want them to know your work and seek your company out. You want to have everything your heart desires materially, and you want to be able to work hard and feel a sense of accomplishment. You want to be able to go have dinner with your honey at any restaurant and not be fucking interrupted constantly. It’s perfect. I can’t go have dinner in Australia, because we’ve had 12 top-10 singles in Australia. So I know what it’s like to be so famous somewhere you’re uncomfortable.Whereas here you have a reasonably small but really devoted group of fans.

And they’re almost exclusively people that we like. And it’s been great—it’s been a fucking fantastic career. We just make records that we need to have somebody make, which means we’ll never make a record that is the current thing. We can’t. We’re too reactionary. We’re always filling the gap. And that means we’ll never be a big hit-record band. That’s the difference between art and entertainment—entertainment just tries to imitate the flashier points of art.

Well, you’re definitely not following any trends on this record. You open with two pretty long songs, the lyrics address exhaustion and maturity—even the production sounds kind of broken-down and blasted. And the last record was so sleek. It’s like the difference between a Ferrari and—
—and a Volkswagen bus. Yeah, I think we all just sorta longed for the feeling of the rusted-through ’67 VW bus. We made a record for hanging out at the Odditorium. I mean, the last record was just a collection of songs, and when it came out, people fucking hated it. This is a record that we want to hear. We want a record that ambles, but is also beautiful and powerful. I mean, the first song on the record sounds sort of futuristic, but with wooden wheels. How does it do it? And then it goes into this thing that’s less deafening, another four minutes of drone. And then you come out of that, because it’s time to.

Like an Eno record.
Yeah, we tried to. We always try to. Except for that last record, which was trying to be Back In Black.

Do you think the movie Dig! had any effect on the way you’re perceived?
Yeah, I think we’re no longer suspect. I think people know that we’re really self-aware, and we don’t really give a fuck if people hate us or not. We don’t go around hurting people’s feelings, we’re not small or vicious—and if we are, we learn to overcome it. We’re people who have learned a few things about getting along with people. [Pause]. Even really fucked-up people. I mean, we got spared the hatchet on that movie. Anton (Newcombe, leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre) got it bad. Anton got edited so it showed only the worst year and a quarter of his life. He got completely used, in a Jerry Springer fashion, so that Ondi (Timoner, director of Dig!) could pull people’s anger strings and heartstrings so that she could become a famous filmmaker. And that’s her job; her job is not to put us up for sainthood.

Were you aware when you were narrating the film that it skewed so negatively?
Not at all. I was just reading stuff. It’s a friend making a film, I helped her out. I didn’t know at all what the fucking movie was.

In a perverse way, I feel like the process of making that movie is just a grand-scale version of what happens in the music industry: You make your songs, you are who you are, but there’s a degree to which people finding out about you is dependent upon some other mediator, and how that mediator presents you to an audience—whether that mediator is the press, or your label, or whatever.
Totally. And in our case it worked for us, because we saw it as an opportunity to make more friends. Which is why Pete (Holmstrom, Dandy Warhols guitarist) and I put a band together in the first place: so we could meet other cool people and go over to their house, and they’re playing T.Rex or Galaxie 500 or whatever.