Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil

There are lots of 60's punk revival bands out there nowadays. But The Black Lips are kind of pissing all over the genre's territory. I don't know how cogent that analogy is but what I mean is The Black Lips are cool and they basically own the garage rock genre. They're dirty and lo-fi and they're kind of insane.

Fourth grade thesis statement: In this essay I am going to tell you about the Black Lips new album Good Bad Not Evil, their live show, and the bassist's cock (which is very fat).

I'll bet if a kid in grade four wrote something about a fat cock in his essay he'd be expelled or disciplined. Then he'd get spanked by his step-father. I'm not in fourth grade and I can talk about cocks all I want. This review is already making our website punker.

The new Black Lips album, Good Bad Not Evil- the title of which is a reference to that old Shangri-Las song- is really cool. Do you hyphenate Shangri-Las? I forget. I like how I don't bother researching shit and I just ask our readers. That's kind of my thing.

The album's songwriting is really similar to the songwriting on their other albums. Which means a lot of call and response vocals, cool bass lines, fuzzy guitars, and dirty words. The sound quality is noticeably higher on this release though. Still lo-fi but not as much as their older stuff. Though their last release before this one was live so whatever.

Many of the songs sound the same but that's to be expected in garage punk rock. I hate song by song breakdowns and I always skip them when I read album reviews (so stop doing them you pretentious, superfluously thorough fags). I just want you to know my favorite song on the album. It's "Bad Kids". That song fucking kicks ass. Aforementioned call and response vocals abound! The lyrics are all about being a bad kid. It's hilarious. Sample lyric themes: running from the cops, demanding pills, smoking cigarettes and spray painting walls....with penises! As if the lyrics weren't cool enough they throw in the spray painting part. And I love how they chose to spray paint a penis. That's just so great. It's exactly what a bad kid would do. I hang out with bad kids sometimes and whenever I draw a picture on a bar napkin Russel the One-Eyed Wonder Muscle invariably makes a surprise appearance. "Fuck, man...of course you drew a dick on my napkin art!" Usually I draw a dog and he always gets a disproportionally large weiner courtesy of my bad kid friends.

So yeah, album gets 4.2 anti-bears because I think the better sound quality is really beneficial overall. It also gets 2.0 bears because the sound quality is higher.

One of the coolest features of being in a garage rock band is the elimination of the all-too-common criticism "this band never evolves!" The Black Lips started recording in raw, really low fidelity. Their evolution is easily achieved by recording in higher fidelity. Now they can evolve through devolution and the next album can be lo-fi again. They can then oscillate between the two fidelities for the duration of their career. Awesome!

Fourth grade transition: Now I will talk about the Black Lips' live show. I've never seen them live but that'll change October 6th down here in H-Town. I've heard they make out with each other. I've seen pictures of them in Vice and the guitarist was covered in blood! Yeah! I eat that kind of shit up. I've heard their cocks make some public appearances too.

Which is a nice segue into my conclusion. Go look at the album art for Deerhunter's Turn It Up Faggot album. It's a naked dude with an animal mask in a profile view, black and white photo negative picture. That's the bassist from the Black Lips, Jared. Now that peepee of his is pretty damn big. I mean the length is just fine. It's about average I'd say..nothing to write home about. But the girth! Damn, dude, that's a fat dick! You can stop drinking milk now!

with love,
Daniel

Ed. note - Here's the penis.