Whatever you like to call the Black Lips' particular branch of guitar rock-- garage, revival, their own "flower punk" tag-- it's an easier sell whenever the band in question is painted the fastest, craziest, or most depraved in the land. But it's long past time we put the band's reputation and ridiculous press aside and look at them for who they are; they're neither buffoons nor savants, and they deserve to be judged on their music, which was plenty maniacal without taking any outside factors into consideration. Now on the verge of a potential breakthrough-- maybe because of it, who knows-- on 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.
Indeed, the cleaner sound and summery pop of Good Bad Not Evil has been ditched here for a psychedelic haze. From opening track "Take My Heart" onward, vocals are more obscured by echo, guitars play queasy, atonal leads, and the rhythm section pokes and ambles around the beat. Some tracks are subtly weird-- like the simmering breakdown of "Drugs", where the band's voices get not so much quieter as they do smaller-- and there's more full-on psychedelia on"Big Black Baby Jesus of Today", a Southern swamp shuffle drenched in toothache-inducing guitar bends and unhinged vocals. Closer "I Saw God" takes an already near-inscrutable ode to a minor drug epiphany and manipulates it with tape-masking and censoring "bleep" noises, before its full-band climax goes off less like a tidal wave of sound and more like someone falling over a drum riser. If there's beauty in imperfections, some of these songs are shrines.
No one's going to mistake this record for anyone but Black Lips, but they are stretching out as band here, pulling back their own tics in favor of things like style and tone. Vocal duties are spread more democratically among the band, and more styles are dabbled with, though they haven't moved the needle too far on the college radio dial. There's faux-innocent greaser-pop like "Drugs", some Byrdsian jangle added to the sobriety pledge of "Starting Over" ("while I'm still lucid... my wounds won't stop oozing"), and "Trapped in a Basement", a weirdly theatrical number that combines country twang with woozy keyboard tones. But before you say there are no surprises on the record, there's also a rap song: "The Drop I Hold" is a definite departure, though maybe not one as drastic as it first seems. The scratchy orchestral loop underneath that would be more appropriate for an early Wu-tang record, but Cole Alexander rap-sings its lyrics, sings its hook, wails like a ghost in the background in the same way they hit the high notes in "Trapped in a Basement", and even imitates a turntable scratch with childlike exuberance. It's as if he's singing along to a favorite song that existed already.
You could say the same about many of this band's best songs, and that's no criticism. They're obvious about their influences, but thankfully never fussy or precious about them. The results still hold something palpably reckless and earnest, refracting tradition through their own filthy lens. Black Lips haven't lost their lack for songcraft-- "Short Fuse" is so sleekly and effortlessly catchy that any disparate sound they graft onto it (paisley 60s pop, hammy piano hammering, an ancient B-movie whoosh) sticks by force of inertia. But whether or not Black Lips have changed their M.O. much, 200 Million Thousand is less consistent than any of their previous albums, with more winding paths than real peaks.
