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.