September 14, 2007
Preview: The Black Lips @ The Black Cat
Consider this a warning. The Black Lips, Atlanta's favorite juvenile delinquents, have the capability to turn any live show into a living, breathing OSHA health hazard. Even if managing to avoid the quartet's spit, vomit, blood and urine, one should still expect to exit the club soaked in PBR.
Admittedly, the antics, which have also included on-stage intra-band brawls and makeout sessions, could originally be attributed to both teenage drunkenness and lack of technical ability. However, as the band has improved musically over the past seven years, the flaming drum kit, lit firecrackers, airborne body fluids and errant livestock are no longer a necessary distraction -- but they still remain a powerful draw. No one knows what stunts the Black Lips are going to pull next.
Photo by Daniel Arnold from the band's Myspace.
Even relatively tame shows by The Black Lips standards provide a good showcase for their raw garage rock anthems. The band owes an obvious debt to heavyweights such The Stooges, The Troggs and The Kinks, but their songwriting holds up and keeps them current, even if it's in a somewhat puerile manner. In Good Bad Not Evil track "O Katrina!" for instance, singers Cole Alexander and Jared Swilley sing about a mean-spirited girl from New Orleans. An older song, "Fairy Stories," starts with the line, "My daddy has a gun/It's not a toy, but it's loads of fun." Mature, these guys aren't.
Still, their live show has been the buzz generator. They've been banned from, and then let back into clubs such as New York City's Bowery Ballroom and Athens, Georgia's 40 Watt Club. Furthermore, it's their live album, Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo, recorded on a tequila-soaked night in Tijuana, that's responsible for putting them on the radar. Although the listener can't see the crowd break down the barrier between the stage and the audience, the energy is palatable. Regardless of what stunts they pull, The Black Lips hold the promise of an entertaining night.
The Black Lips play the Black Cat Saturday night with The Selmanaires and The Points. $12, 9 p.m.
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Does the guy in the blue shirt have a crazy mustache or is he just perfectly posed behind something in the field to make it look like he has a crazy mustache? Because it does. It looks like he has a crazy mustache.
Is this show going to happen? I had tickets to it, but got a call from Ticketmaster saying the show was cancelled.
Tickets are still being sold on Ticketmaster right now and we haven't received any word that it's been canceled.
The Black Lips show is definitely NOT cancelled. Tickets are still on sale and the show will go on as scheduled.
-- The Black Cat
"PBR"
"makeout sessions"
"lack of technical ability"
Boy, hipsters are cool.
DCfist, what people refer to as "hipsters" in DC are a subclass of indierock adults who are wealthy and overachieving but are intelligent enough or are urbane enough to have tastes beyond mainstream popular culture but are not culturally aware enough due to their economic status to be truly aware of underground culture.
If you please, Black Lips are not hipsters rather flower punks in an age of mechanical representation.
"If you please, Black Lips are not hipsters rather flower punks in an age of mechanical representation."
Or they're just fucking goofy, repeating oft-successful gimmicks to distract from lackluster and unoriginal musical compositions. Scenesters will attend this show en masse and talk through it.
Nice gaystache on that guy on the left.
guests 7 & 8 just made my day.
"repeating oft-successful gimmicks" has man on man kissing and crowd directed urination worked previously for bands?
i think you old uninformed people are misunderstanding about this band. while yes, there probably will be people there in tight jeans & chuck taylors & crazy mid20s haircuts, the black lips are not the douchewrapped emotive losers of college rock they belong to a lesser more deprived sound.
but they are on vice and i'm sure kids still young enough to care about scenes will be in attendance, yes.
They makeout with each other onstage as a gimmick?? Where can I sign up?? How much for a mustache ride?
I didn't know anything about the Black Lips past what I read here until I went to the show on Saturday night.
Ian was working the merch table before they went on, when I walked up he immediately introduced himself and started talking about how much he loved the Points and the Selmanaires. Kind of cool that one of the headliners was flacking for the opening acts IMHO.
I also had a chance to rap with Jared before the show. Usually when you see someone rocking those micro OP shorts from 1983 and a John C. Holmes mustache to match, it's some sort of "look at how cool and ironic I am" thing but I didn't get that vibe from Jared at all. I'm not sure what the backstory was, but he played their set with a bass borrowed from the Selmanaires.
Apparently The Points have been having some "Behind the Music" kind of drama over the last couple of weeks, but it didn't show on stage. They played a very tight set, one of their better performances according to Dr. Mayhem. I thought the sound was a little muddy, but that could have been because I was directly in front of the stage or I might just not know what I'm talking about.
I missed most of the Selmanaires set while downstairs eating a falafel, what I heard was interesting but not really my speed.
There were tons of kiddies, I can't remember the last time I saw so many people under 21 at a show. It looked like every one of those kids knew the words to just about every Black Lips song. At one point a particularly enthusiastic youngster with a blond afro was flopping all over one of the monitors at the front of the stage and was in the process of getting ejected by a very skinny bouncer, but Ian intervened and demanded that the kid be allowed to stay.
The Black Lips set was very high energy, but I couldn't really figure out what to make of them for the first half dozen songs. At first it struck me as the same kind of garage/punkabilly played by the Woggles or Thee Crucials, both are great bands that put on a kick ass show, but nothing I hadn't heard before. Then the Black Lips kicked into high gear and made it impossible for me to stand still any longer. Not knowing anything about the band I don't know the name of the song that really got me; it had a kind of Stone Roses feel to it, with like a sitar kind of sounding intro to each verse. Afterwards I turned to Dr. Mayhem and announced, "I'm sold!"
I already burned through my 90 downloads for the month, but the new Black Lips album Good Bad, Not Evil is available on eMusic with an eMusic only bonus track.
"repeating oft-successful gimmicks" has man on man kissing and crowd directed urination worked previously for bands?
See one Marilyn Manson.