This Machine (album)

Background and recording

While playing at Sydney's Enmore Theatre in May 2011 as part of their 2011 Australian tour, lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor announced the new album would be titled This Machine and is to be released in February 2012 (Taylor-Taylor had previously jokingly announced it as The Pastor of Muppets, Shitty Shitty Band Band or Whirled Piece in blog posts on the band's official website). On the same tour, the band debuted two new songs which would later appear on the album, "Seti vs. the Wow! Signal" and "Rest Your Head".

This Machine was recorded between May to November 2011.

The band collaborated with ex-Bauhaus member David J on the track "The Autumn Carnival"; J co-wrote the song and supplied backing vocals and bass guitar to the track.

Release

The band announced the release of the album's first single, "Well They're Gone", on their website on March 1, 2012, allowing visitors to download the track for free after entering their email address. A music video for the track "Sad Vacation" was released to YouTube on April 20.

This Machine was released on April 24, 2012.

Critical reception

The album has received a mixed response from critics. Benjamin Aspray of PopMatters wrote "Like reformed alcoholics who were more fun when they drank, This Machine is alternately sullen and unconvincingly earnest, and inoffensive to a fault. [...] As the appropriately titled The Dandy Warhols Are Sound—the pre-Nick Rhodes version of Welcome to the Monkey House—made abundantly clear, a stripping down does not become them. They're an object lesson in self-conscious style as substance, and that's the fun of it!" Pitchfork gave it a 5.1/10 grade, their highest rating for a Dandy Warhols since 1997's ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down, calling it "the most sober Dandy Warhols album to date, reining in the stoner rock sprawl, the curled-lip snark and bad puns endemic to so many Dandys releases", but "an all-too-fitting descriptor of a band going through the motions", commenting that frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor "just sounds bored". The A.V. Club gave it a 'D' grade, calling it "an undistinguished slog of an album".

AllMusic, on the other hand, gave it a positive review, writing "It's the closest the band has come yet to something genuinely uplifting and irony-free – no small feat for these tongue-in-cheek provocateurs, but This Machine suggests that the Dandy Warhols are actually improving with age, which is an even bigger accomplishment."