Black Lips: Sing in a World That's Falling Apart (Fire/Southbound)

 |   |  1 min read

Holding Me Holding You
Black Lips: Sing in a World That's Falling Apart (Fire/Southbound)
While no artist – as we have said previously – should be held to their press release, someone with a functioning frontal cortex in Black Lips' team might have called a halt to the absurd hype about this band's reductive pop . . . . a band which had apparently gone where “no garage punk band had done before”.

Uh-uh.

And – after having recored with Mark Ronson and Sean Lennon – Black Lips (a band out out of Atlanta, Georgia which formed almost 20 years ago) come back here with . . . .

Okay, let's just blow the whistle on such nonsense and accept that they have now moved into country music post-Byrds (Sweetheart is cited as a touchstone).

Breathlessly, we note they recorded this in a recently re-opened Valentine Studio in Laurel Canyon (Stan Kenton to Frank Zappa, big bands to Beach Boys)

But it's what you do in there, not what those artists did.

Right?

And what Black Lips do – and it isn't “country music but not as we know it” as their over-egging press release says – is make . . .

Well, a very low-level post-Byrds country-rock, some hoe-down folk-rock, a bit of faux-working class country-rock with pedal steel, their garageband take on the genre of country-rock and . . .

Every now and again they approach Keith Richards' dissolute take on country (Get It On Time) but then they follow it up with Angola Rodeo which sounds like a rejected Seventies-styled track from the soundtrack to Dazed and Confused.

By the way boys, burping in a song isn't funny or of much interest, even in that context.

There are moments here when they almost get the Southern boogie-pop thing down cold, as on Odelia which in the Allman's hands would have been a spiralling 15 minutes but here is an incomplete 2.22 which they can't see their way of.

And the condescending Live Fast Die Slow at the end is one of those fake live-barroom nonsense things.

Mostly this – maybe Chains aside – is very very ordinary.

Lots of four star reviews in the UK but the “nah” from here could not be bigger.

You may hear this album at Spotify here.

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases

IN BRIEF: A quick overview of some recent international releases

With so many CDs commanding and demanding attention Elsewhere will run this occasional column which scoops up releases by international artists, in much the same way as our SHORT CUTS column picks... > Read more

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: the feelers; Supersystem (Warners)

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: the feelers; Supersystem (Warners)

New Zealand critics never much liked the feelers, but that hardly slowed them down. Knowing that living well is the best revenge they just kept making big selling albums and embarking on highly... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

GUEST WRITER CHRIS BOURKE shares an extract from his new book Goodbye Maoriland, The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War

GUEST WRITER CHRIS BOURKE shares an extract from his new book Goodbye Maoriland, The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War

Editor's note: Chris Bourke is a writer, journalist and radio producer who in the past was editor of Rip It Up, arts and books editor at the NZ Listener and for many years produced the Saturday... > Read more

Various: The Roots of Led Zeppelin (Proper/Southbound)

Various: The Roots of Led Zeppelin (Proper/Southbound)

To some small but much lesser degree we've been down this path before with the DVD Down the Tracks: The Roots of Led Zeppelin recently posted here. But as noted, that was interesting enough but... > Read more