The Black Lips are something of a contemporary American cultural curiosity, travelling with the world with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the average American tourist. Bass player Jarrod Cole once suggested – with his tongue not necessarily concealed in his cheek – that the band possessed an almost perverse desire to indulge the locations where Americans are subject of the highest levels of suspicion, derision and abuse.
The title of the Black Lips’ latest record, Arabia Mountain, suggests the band has found something in the Arab lands of both inspiration and attraction; in reality, the album is less influenced by Arabic cultural traditions than the Black Lips’ perfectly honed mixture of garage rock sensibility and irreverent humour.
Like the historical landscape from which the title originates, Arabia Mountain has it all. Family Tree jumps out of the speakers like a hyperactive kid pinned to the eyeballs on red cordial and ’60s bubblegum garage, Spidey’s Curse marries arachnophobia, body image and Ricky Nelson on mescalin, and Bicentennial Man is Texan garage in all its acidic glory.
On Go Out and Get It the Black Lips head down to the corner store for a bag of mixed lollies and a set of Sky Saxon swap cards; the one-two sucker punch of Time and Dumpster Drive is a homage to the elegant simplicity of the Rolling Stones, the former a tribute to the Stones in their bowl cuts and r’n’b guise, the latter brimming with Keef’s opiate stained Exile licks. The juvenile spirit of The Kingsmen is all over the Noc-A-Homa like a dirty rash, while Mr Driver, The Lie, You Keep On Running offer freaked-out lashings of good ol’ boy southern psychedelia. And when the Black Lips latch onto a killer riff – witness Modern Art, complemented by New Direction – there’s ne’er a band that comes close.
As the United States teeters on the precipice of default – a natural consequence of the nation’s perverse fascination with excessive spending, laced with an ideological reluctance to untangle itself from the peer pressure of the military industrial complex – it’s good to see the mythologised spirit of its political and philosophical ancestors lives on, albeit in an artist guise that would have scared the shit out of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. As long as the Black Lips live on, there is good in America.
Key track: Modern Art
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In a word: Garage
