Dean & Britta: 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Considering Luna’s hypnotically bouncy take on Velvet Underground riffing, its collaborations with Sterling Morrison, and an appearance on the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack, who better to score the 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests DVD than indie power couple Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips The screen tests themselves—which include Lou Reed lazily shilling for Coca-Cola and Nico fidgeting in chiaroscuro—are something like Warhol’s photo-booth portraits, with a slow-burning intensity that meshes perfectly with the understated space-rock and loping guitar jams that populate the soundtrack. With the exception of a cover of the Velvets rarity “Not AYoung Man Anymore,” Dean & Britta aren’t interested in compensating for the lack of dynamism in the largely static film. An Auto-Tuned take on Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” introduces mannerly tambourine while evening out the uncooperative strings of Nico’s version, and in the process, it injects just a bit of “Street Hassle” propulsion and verve. Along with the sleepy “Silver Factory Theme”—a kind of vocal-free thumbnail sketch of “Pale Blue Eyes”—13 opens at the pace of a morphine drip, but the playful “Eyes In My Smoke” and the haunted-house atmospherics of “International Velvet Redux” keep the album from echoing the tedium of, say, “Andy Warhol Eats A Hamburger.”