The ferocious foursome that is the Black Lips has been touring relentlessly for the past seven years, stopping at the Black Cat this Saturday. But don't be surprised if you haven't heard of the band - only recently has the band received attention from major media outlets.
The group signed on to Vice Records early this year after releasing previous records on In the Red Records.
"We knew Vice had a different type of audience," said drummer Joe Bradley. "And we wanted to expand beyond our already established underground audience. Plus, they were going to hire a publicist because they had a lot more money to actually support the band and promote us and everything."
With the band's unflinching work ethic, Vice's publicist merely had to cut through the red tape and let the Lips do the talking, as Rolling Stone has since named it the best live band of the year. More recently, The New York Times dubbed the band "the hardest working band at South by Southwest," where the Black Lips played nine shows in two days, while most bands played only one festival set and a corporate party if they were lucky.
"Eventually, if you work hard enough at something, it finally pays off, which I hope that principle works throughout all walks of life," Bradley said.
The Black Lips' first album for Vice, "Los Valientes Del Mundo Nuevo," functioned as a greatest-hits album recorded live in Tijuana.
"You see live albums all the time, like 'Live from Atlanta, Georgia,' 'Live from, like, Minneapolis' --that just doesn't sound very interesting," Bradley said. "We wanted to go with a fun idea, and people would always coin us as debaucherous and things like that, so we figured we'd go to the mecca of debauchery - Tijuana - and have a good time."
The band's self-produced second album for Vice, "Good Bad Not Evil," was released this past Tuesday. While recorded in the Lips' comparatively tame hometown of Atlanta, the move hasn't affected the band's howl-at-the-moon vocals, feral guitars and devil-may-care attitude. The album is yet another addition to an evolving discography in which everything old is new again.
The album opens with the Link Wray-flavored vagrant country-twanging, tongue-wagging, toe-tapping blues rock on "I Saw A Ghost (Lean)" and continues throughout the album on "Navajo," an open-ended love letter to North American indigenous women, and "Bad Kids," a no-apologies, be-who-you-are exaltation of juvenile delinquency.
The entire album is tinged with Stooges flair, as Cole Alexander shouts the chorus in "It Feels Alright" ? la Iggy in "Down on the Street," and grill-sporting Ian St. Pe pulls the occasional Ron Asheton cry from his guitar. Songs with the attitudinal range of old-soul blues to ridiculous revelry mesh seamlessly, a testament to the band's ironically deep-rooted pop sensibility. Its sound, owing as much to the Motor City as it does the Lone Star State, is anachronistic yet refreshing in the current musical climate of overproduced indie pop.
"We're big fans of the way old recordings sound because they always sound really organic," Bradley said of the band's production method. "When we record, we try and recreate that ... we don't record on digital. We just love how worn everything sounds in the old days and how every recording process can be unique, and we don't want our music to sound like everybody else's, so we try to change it or record it in unconventional ways that people don't normally do."
Still, the Lips' live show packs a punch that no amount of studio production can capture. The band's call-and-reply vocals, convulsive strumming and drumming and its magnetic, boyish charm are what keep concertgoers hungry for more Lip action. In the past, the band wriggled its way out of its pants, onto the stage and into the news, the set eventually devolving into an onstage love-or-puke-fest, intra-band make-out sessions and flashing included.
"Back in the day, we couldn't play our instruments that well, so we had to be entertainers about it and basically have as much fun as we could," Bradley said. "But nowadays, we kind of want to get away from that because we don't want to be known as, like, shock rockers or anything like that. And we think we can play our instruments better now, so we try to actually play our songs. We're musicians first, then entertainers."
While concertgoers can't expect to see any of the Black Lips' infamous bodily fluids-flying stage antics when the band hit s the Black Cat this Saturday night, the audience can expect to see a band that is, perhaps more so than any other touring today, ready to rock.
