Album Review: Good Bad Not Evil by Black Lips

As grimy as a truck-stop restroom, Atlanta’s Black Lips want to be the Pabst-swilling heirs to the Troggs. Already notorious for shows that can apparently involve nudity, fireworks, and chickens (chickens!), these guys might not be as dim as they let on. Take Good Bad Not Evil‘s ”O Katrina!” which kicks off like any lovesick Nuggets stomp, then drops the line ”I can’t believe what’s on the TV screen.” We’re not hearing about a jilted girl anymore, but a jilted city.

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Sixties garage is an anarchic little genre, baring its snaggled teeth every couple of years and roaring in a way that always sounds strangely fashionable and fresh. Atlanta's rowdy Black Lips resort well to its rough pleasures. Mixing garage's crude guitars and scratchy-throated delivery with skewiff country, blues and psychedelia, their fourth studio album ignites with the same rapturous energy as the Sonics and the 13th Floor Elevators.

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Between their live record Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo and the recently released, fourth studio effort Good Bad Not Evil, the Black Lips gained something of a reputation. The Atlanta band's live antics and work ethic were well-publicized (as is most everything else on Vice Records). But even if Los Valientes, ostensibly recorded in Tijuana, was deliberate PR, it found the group in a compellingly transitional stage, reworking a big chunk of their breakthrough LP, Let It Bloom.

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