There aren’t many bands I’ll drive 300 miles to see. And Portland’s Dandy Warhols probably won’t make the list anytime soon. But, there I was at the sweat and beer-funked Vic Theatre in Chicago Friday night (September 12) helping my wife celebrate her birthday with her favorite band.

We’ve seen the Dandy’s in three or four different states (physical locations, not of the mind, though the math on that is questionable as well), and they’ve typically delivered one of two kinds of shows: blissfully transcendent bubblegum drone or frustratingly shambolic noodling. In one case, when they played Lollapalooza in 2005, an all-day wait for their set turned to disappointment when the Dandys seemed determined to out-crazy the Brian Jonestown Massacre with a set that teetered on the edge of madness, extending the sometimes friendly rivalry depicted in the awesome documentary about the Massacre, “DiG!”

The Vic show, thankfully, was one of the former, with the four piece set up in a straight line across the front of the stage, backed by a series of five hanging rectangles of pulsating lights that made eye-tripping patterns and waves of color.

Opening with the quintessential Dandy drone of “The World Come On,” the first song off their independently released new disc, Earth to the Dandy Warhols, the band locked into the song’s hypnotic Donna Summer-lifting “I Feel Love” disco groove and got the blissed-out crowd pumping their fists and bodies. Never ones to play by the rules, the group then served some fat ones up the middle, punching out their semi-hit “We Used to Be Friends” as a “Boogie Nights”-worthy series of late-’70s disco patterns of deep reds and shag carpet oranges swirled on the screens behind them. The new tune “Mission Control” melted into a slow rolling slab of funk that dripped into a bass-heavy “You Were the Last High” and just as it seemed like something was wrong with the spare guitar-and-high-hat-only mix of “All The Money or the Simple Life Honey,” that tune exploded into a Stones-y “Exile on Main Street”-era noise cluster of paisley blues and roll.

True slackers that they are, the Dandys had to take a break just eight songs in, after “Get Off,” because keyboardist Zia McCabe needed to take a bathroom break. The methadone cowboy stomp of “The New Country” made up for it, though, as it was embellished by some bowed guitar playing from Peter Holstrom. As blitzed as he often looks, singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor was clearly hopped up to play a dead-to-rights cover of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” which he modestly dubbed “not half bad.”

To the disappointment of my wife, and the guy up front who yelled, “This is the greatest night of my life!” the band then chugged through “Horse Pills,” Zia said she had to pee again and that was it. Perfectly Dandy.

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