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Black Lips - 200 Million Thousand
| Ew |
| 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 |
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| Rollingstones |
| It's ironic when the Black Lips sing that they're "trapped in a basement" here. Ten years ago, this Atlanta band's purposefully sloppy "flower punk" would have been unjustly confined to basement shows; now it could fit in a Zach Braff film. The Lips' psychedelic and garage heroes loom large: "Big Black Baby Jesus of Today" sounds distractingly like the 13th Floor Elevators, and "Drugs" is all about the New York Dolls. This smart if self-conscious album makes it clear who the Lips would like to be, but it's hard to tell who they really are....full text |
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| Pastemagazine |
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Atlanta's flower punks follow their breakthrough release by heading back to the garage Possibly the most proletariat of all rock forms, garage rock hasn’t produced many acts as flamboyant as Black Lips, the Atlanta, Ga., quartet that was recently chased out of India for being a bit too provocative (read: man-on-man kissing) on stage. That fuck-all attitude has largely characterized their body of work, a five-album oeuvre that has lifted them from genre-enthusiast obscurity and culminated with 200 Million Thousand, a release that continues their life on the margins by further vulgarizing their mix of surf riffs, girl-group hooks, and lo-fi psych. Given the strides made by 2007’s surprisingly polished Good Bad Not Evil, the young “flower punks” (AKA: hippies playing with punk-rock energy) might be poised for a commercial breakthrough, but this album proves they’re in no mood for concessions. Even groggier and soggier than before, the appeal of 200 Million Thousand is as intuitive as it is immediate, from the giddy handclaps and sour harmonies of “Drugs” to the plaintive, early Velvet Underground haze of “Starting Over,” the first song celebrating substance use while the latter repents. Where most of the garage rock rank-and-file are all too pleased to kick out the jams with uniform predictability, the Black Lips ooze an oddly viscous charisma and greasy Southern theatricality. With disorienting backmasking, bits of movie dialogue, and unexpectedly bleeped-out words, “I Saw God” is both a conceptual train wreck and a glorious oddball experiment, just as the funeral parlor organs and possessed vocals of “Trapped in the Basement” recall the leftfield dramas of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The album eventually bogs down in the swaying soar-throat balladry of “I’ll Be with You” and a series of slurring power chord anthems that sound like they are only waiting for an ad exec to drop them in a car commercial. Taken song-by-song, it’s an undeniably enjoyable set, but as an album, it rambles on toward a sense of climax it never quite reaches....full text |
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