Black Lips - 200 Million Thousand Review

They're Atlanta's champions of young dumb fun, remembered less for their garage-rock rave-ups than for the time their guitarist urinated into his own mouth on stage. But on Black Lips' fifth studio album 200 Million Thousand, their music finally catches up with their live-show notoriety. The surf-rock riffs are woozier, the girl-group melodies are brighter, and the in-the-red production channels extra psych-rock paranoia. Better yet, they get plenty of laughs, especially when they rank their bad reputations with some heavy hitters: ''Atomic bomb/Vietnam/BlackLips.com!'' It's a slogan soon to get Sharpied on Chuck Taylors everywhere...full text The Black Lips are a live act. A drunken, rebellious, pissing-on-your-stage and breaking shit group of miscreants. They bear their asses and get run out of entire countries by the law. If you're unfamiliar with their live act, the India Campus Rock Idol debacle was documented by the camera crews of VBS.TV and is airing soon. The best renditions of their trashy tunes are performed while intoxicated. At least that's the mask they hide behind, and the facade they present to the world, but it's hard to believe these guys don't spend the majority of their days wasted, and destroying something.

Their latest album, 200 Million Thousand, succeeds on the heels of their last effort by means of a similar approach: a well-calculated, boozed up blitz through your ear canals. I imagine the recording setup for their studio albums is identical to their raucous live acts, or else they put a lot of energy (and beer) into sounding similar on record. Whatever the formula, 200... works.

Take Drugs, for instance; I can smell the sticky floors of the tiny club, packed to the walls with inebriated young adults, pumping their fists to the anarchistic tone of the guitars that go to eleven while singing along to the care-free lines of "Come along and ride with me. I'll make some space in my dirty back seat...We'll laugh about this tomorrow. Times like this, I hope will follow me!"...full text Across four albums, Black Lips have made sloppiness an aesthetic choice. Their live shows have the feel of a bunch of blitzed teenagers spazzing out on borrowed instruments in a friend's basement. Their records sound like extended pranks. But amateurish charm grows tedious, even when delivered with the balls-out energy this quartet routinely generates. Fortunately, buried beneath the Lips' psychedelic slop heap are surprisingly exacting pop hooks, clever musical experiments, and insidious grooves that belie the band's wastrel image.

"Drugs," the second track on the Atlanta jesters' fifth album, exemplifies the lips' appealing dichotomy: It's an ode to getting fucked-up with hookers in the backseat of your car, sung by bassist Jared Swilley in a suitably unhinged wail, but set to an impossibly infectious 1950s sock-hop beat. On "Starting Over," Cole Alexander sounds like he's singing into a half-empty tin of creamed corn, but his woozy slurs are buffeted by a warm, jangling guitar line nicked from the La's' "There She Goes."...full text