When it comes to snot-nosed punks cracking wise, the Black Lips are right up there with the immortals—The Dictators, the Angry Samoans, Kix, the Dead Milkmen, the Beastie Boys even. Since their formation in 1999 the outré garage rockers from Atlanta, Georgia have been turning out irreverent anthems—“Bad Kids” and “Juvenile” being amongst the best of them—for fellow delinquents the world over. Their music is a deliriously funny salute to the proposition that stages are meant to be pissed from, and the best example of this is 2007’s “maybe” live LP, Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo.
Purportedly recorded at a club in Tijuana, Mexico, Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo is one of the most riotous live albums I’ve ever heard, and in the end it doesn’t much matter if it was recorded in the tequila-reek of a dissolute cantina in the Gateway to Mexico or in a studio in Kalamazoo. (The dispute over the recording’s actual provenance is likely to be waged forever, from YouTube—on which you can find what looks to me like some convincing film footage—to your house.) People sing sea shanties and howl in Spanish, a mariachi trumpet gets played, glass gets broken, songs stop halfway through, and there’s a lot of alarming electrical crackle. And if you listen real hard you can hear the Black Lips crank out one great acid-tinged garage rock tune after another. But don’t sweat the lo-fi sound quality—it’s every bit as good as that on their studio albums!
Both Cole Alexander and Jared Swilley—high school pals who got tossed out their senior year in the wake of the Columbine Massacre for posing a quote subculture danger unquote—have nasal voices that remind me of the Dead Milkmen’s Joe Genaro, and when they sing together, which is often, it’s a treat. And not only do the lads in Black Lips have a knack for crafting simple but catchy garage rock songs with zip, they have the swagger and just enough chops to fill them out. Which is more than I can say for most of the Dead Milkmen’s oeuvre.
Certain songs stick out; “Boomerang” is a great sing-along sung in tandem by Alexander and Swilley, and features some freaky sound effects, while “Sea of Blasphemy” is, well, a great sing-along sung in tandem by Alexander and Swilley featuring lots of bottle smashing. “Not a Problem” could almost pass for an early R.E.M. song until somebody lets out a great scream, and boasts some really groovy swinging sixties guitar wank, to say nothing of some sweet vocal call and response between the boys in the band. “Boone”—which opens with the great lines, “Sick and tired but I gave it a shot”—kicks along the way a great garage rock song should, and that goes double for “Fairy Stories,” which opens with the immortal lines, “My daddy has a gun/It’s not a toy/But it’s loads of fun.”
The swaggering “Everybody’s Doing It” is the best dance craze song of the New Millennium, even if the Bad Lips aren’t singing about dancing. (To be honest, I have no idea what they’re singing about.) As for “Juvenile,” it’s a crash’em bash’em punk rocker that includes a wonderfully prolonged scream and one truly sickly guitar solo, and that ends in noise, carnage, and deranged mariachi blurt. Meanwhile “Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah” boasts a sound so psychedelic your eyes will turn to pinwheels just listening to it. As for closer “A Lion With Wings,” it’s a demented lark featuring bird song and one truly eerie falsetto, and sounds like it was recorded at another locale altogether.
If the Black Lips are infamous for their on-stage antics—vomiting, urinating, nudity, lewd acts with chickens, you name it—their music is at the bottom sweet-natured. The tres catchy “Dirty Hands” (“Hands/Do you really wanna hold my dirty hands?”) reminds me of nothing so much as the Dictators’ smart-aleck but endearingly heartwarming cover of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” a duet featuring “Adny” Shernoff and my hero and yours, “Handsome Dick” Manitoba. Why, the boys in the Black Lips even sing “Dirty Hands” in what to me sounds like fake New Yawk accents. A tribute perhaps?
The Black Lips are no more a subculture danger than the Beastie Boys, which is to say the only thing they think worth fighting about is their right to get wasted and throw up on stage. If you like the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” you’ll love the Black Lips. If you don’t like the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” I wash my hands of you. Los valiantes del Mundo Nuevo indeed.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
