Written by DCist contributor Spencer Ackerman

Courtney Taylor-Taylor promised he wouldn't talk about politics. As it turned out, he kept about 75 percent of his word. "Do we want an intellectual," asked the Dandy Warhols frontman last night, "or do we want someone who appeals to dumb?" The band let the question hang before opening its 9:30 Club set with "Mohammed," a drony number from its breakthrough album, 2000's Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia.

Longtime Dandys fans — a respectable number of whom filled the club — are used to the band making good on about 75 percent of its promises. Formed in Portland in 1993, the Dandy Warhols spent nearly half a decade being hyped as the next alt-rock behemoth. It would have been a credit to good taste if they had been. The four-piece links the wall-of-guitar shoegaze of Ride to the saccharine bombast of Duran Duran, a combination held together by Taylor-Taylor's deliberately obnoxious pronouncements. ("You maybe think I'm too smart and weird/ but that should only make you want to hear/ that I love you," goes "I Love You" from 1997's The Dandy Warhols Come Down, which is most certainly not about whomever Taylor-Taylor professes to love.) To complain about the Dandys' self-indulgence is to commit a category error: they look at a few major-chord themes and think, if that's a good four-minute song, it'll make a great nine-minute one. One of their biggest fans, unsurprisingly, is David Bowie.

(Ryan Holloway for DCist)

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The price of that sort of self-indulgence has been the burst of the 1990s Dandys boomlet. Europe and Australia provide the bulk of the bands' album sales. In the U.S., the band isn't exactly a cult phenomenon, but it's definitely a specialty flavor. The Dandys, who clearly remain charmed by their rock-and-roll lifestyle, have spent the last decade trying to get the cultural palette used to the taste. The results haven't always reflected well on the band. Its 1995 debut album began with a joke introduction called, "The Dandy Warhols TV Theme Song". Ten years later, its biggest hit came when "We Used To Be Friends", from 2003's Welcome To The Monkey House, became the theme song to Rob Thomas' cult TV show Veronica Mars.

Sometimes it seems as if the Dandys' hipster sensibilities — their drummer and backup singer, Brent DeBoer, wears a mustache to match his whiteboy afro — are embarrassed by their ambition. "We Used To Be Friends" was, dutifully, their second number at the 9:30, which appeared like an attempt to get it out of the way. What's more, the band tweaked it, changing its rhythm until it sounded reminiscent of the Status Quo's "Pictures Of Matchstick Men". Some furrowed eyebrows appeared in the audience.

But not many. The Dandys' turn to quasi-cult status has meant that those prepared to pay $25 for a Monday-night ticket are there to yell out lyrics, push up to the stage, and bounce around unapologetically. These are the people who support the band through a music-industry downturn and allow it to make two consecutive albums of ethereal, spacey rock. (Its most recent album, released last month, is called Earth To The Dandy Warhols.) Very little the band could do would be rejected by a crowd like this: at least one person behind me appeared to be having a religious experience, incanting "I — love — this band" with an eerie peacefulness three times in two hours. Frontman Taylor-Taylor at one point played drums while the rhthym section took a bathroom break halfway through.

Befitting the comfort level the Dandys have maintained 15 years into their career, the set never accellerated past mid-tempo. It was more than enough for its fans. "How about something political?" Taylor-Taylor asked after playing the would-be anthem "Boys Better" from Come Down. "'Sunday Bloody Sunday'?" Instead, they ended with "Country Leaver", an unserious take on the Rolling Stones' unserious take on country music. (Liking the Dandy Warhols requires a high tolerance for insufferability.) Shuffling off the stage, Taylor-Taylor noted the voter-registration volunteers running around with clipboards by the merch booth and urged, "If you're here and you can make a difference, do it..." Mission mostly accomplished.