a case for the black lips

The Black Lips’ Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo is Vice Recordings’ first-ever rock & roll record. Vice has put out rock music in the past, for sure — Bloc Party, Death From Above, the Stills, etc — but never rock & roll, a surprising fact until you consider r&r’s hip gap, and Vice’s whole empire has been built on growing that hip gap between us and them (good luck figuring out what side you are on). When word came out that Vice would be distributing the Black Lips, I was shocked. So entrenched in the cult of cool, what could Vice be seeing in the Lips, an excellent Atlanta band who play straight-ahead garage rock, a genre that gets 40-year-old beer bellies shaking at record fairs?

Perhaps Vice wanted a touring band (the Lips are most certainly that) or to just simply put out the kind of record that the folks who work there actually listen to, but in any event, it’s mostly good news for the band. “Mostly” because while Vice will certainly open up new years to the band’s powers (and they be many), does Vice even get on the radar of the sort of person who normally listens to this stuff?

In any event, considering the ridiculous powers of the Vice publicity machine, this Black Lips record has been way too slept on. Billed as a live record recorded in Tijuana — not that I exactly believe it; that’s just cultural tourism as press/marketing angle — it’s simply a really damn great, raucous garage rock album, loose when it’s supposed to be, tight when it isn’t.

“Dirty Hands” and “Not a Problem,” currently available free at eMusic, are two of my faves, but they can’t hold a shot glass to “Everybody’s Doing It” (available, like most of the songs, on their final In the Red record, Let It Bloom) and its swooning chorus of “bawwwwawwwwww” and four-chord grit. With its partying, skit-like song intros and outros, it’s obvious that the band and Vice are consciously viewing this album as a reason for existence (check how rough’n'tumble we/they are!) (there’s even a very audible burp during an “Everybody’s Doing It” chorus), but there’s no escaping that these Georgians are just great retro songwriters, penning songs we’ve all heard before but don’t mind if we hear again. And so you should, too.