Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band's Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They're a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album's release.
Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. The "garage rock" tag will perpetually follow this band, and while I'm not saying it isn't sometimes apt, there's a difference between being a revival act and seeming blissfully out of time. Black Lips' idea of being topical is writing a jilted love song to a girl named Katrina from New Orleans, and their idea of diversity is writing a country song about breaking a death to children (and sounding terribly inconvenienced by doing so). It's as if they missed the past 30 years of rock history; perhaps they drank the memory away.
While it may not be as blistering as the band's early work, or even this year's "live" Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo-- because where else could you really go after that?-- Good Bad nonetheless stands tall in their catalog for finding a way to turn it down without becoming tame. Here, Black Lips fold all of the bacchanalia into the corners of direct, vintage pop songs, so that the new tracks have taken on an ominous tone without being quite as off-the-rails as the band's reputation would suggest. Note the brief moments of backwards guitar in the otherwise, uh, lean "Lean", a twangy undistorted march with plenty of echo on the ragged vocals.
"Veni Vidi Vici" is the biggest and wariest step forward, with a drum loop somewhere between Motown and Madchester, replete with a vibra-slap that will forever evoke hot summer evenings and a chorus that's as irrepressible and arrogant as a soccer chant. Yet for the most part, Black Lips don't stray from their comfort zone, they just push that zone outward. Their spooky quasi-mystical element gets much spookier on "Lock and Key", a blues vamp slithering its way from an Indian burial ground, and their flower-punk gets more flowery on "It Feels Alright" (formerly "Good Bad Not Evil"), where singer Cole Alexander varies his voice to evoke two singers-- a touch that's charming, almost comical, and completely punk.
The band is still preoccupied with its reckless bad-boy image, as "Bad Kids" is a country-inflected sing-along to the merits of irresponsibility that sounds so puerile it's almost self-deprecating. Still, they're hardly one-note here: "Cold Hands" is the record's lead-off single and probably its catchiest song, but it's more wounded than brash, lyrically occupied with trying the straight and narrow and failing rather than eschewing it entirely. It's a nice change of pace that hits a new emotional center-- for two-and-a-half minutes anyway.
Throwbacks to earlier albums-- such as "Slime and Oxygen", with its stomping circular rhythms, caterwauling guitar bends, and more-than-usual vocal echo-- already pale next to the braver material. Even the record's few missteps are at least adventurous, including colliding immaturity with more mysticism on the toy-piano-led "Transcendental Light". Were you to grab any of their older records-- which you really should-- you could hear a band out-freak the best of them. But Good Bad Not Evil is evidence that they want to do something more, which is heartening-- and here they've accomplished it.
