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Album Details

• Artist: The Black Lips
• Album: Black Lips!
• Label: Bomp
• Year of Release: 2003
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2005-05-30

Oh, there is something sinister in this here garage! Most bands that have attempted to make a go of it as a garage or rockabilly act, at least since the late 60's, have seemed to have overlooked the one main ingredient that made those genres so durable: MENACE!. Bands like Music Machine, Sonics, Seeds were not joking around with that farfisa (hell, the Seed's Sky Saxon even became a cult leader for awhile). The Black Lips, much more so that label mates Coffin Lids, The Gories, or going back a bit, Lyres and Phantom Creepers, the Black Lips are implying something dirty and maybe even downright socio-pathic with their distorto-holler. I got chills on listening, not only for the barely controlled insanity of tunes like, but also for having discovered a band I knew was going to be on at my house all the time for months. Hope in music is made of that.
Hope progressively declines on the record, however. The early wild ranting of "Freakout" and "Ain't No Big Deal" starts to sink with "I've Got A Knife", toppling over the mental edge with the incestuous "Sweet Kin" and "Everybody Loves a Cocksucker", which sounds like a demo made by Brian Jones while underwater in the pool. There's your menace. The last two, especially "Sweet Kin" have caused some to question whether or not Black Lips are a con. Do I think they look with wanton come-hither at real relatives? No. Do I think that this is a band that has some ugly ideas and some appropriate tunes in their heads to back them up? Yep. At least for a debut record, they're for real.

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