The band takes a step back into the murkier waters from whence it came.
Atlanta’s anarchic Black Lips clawed its way to the top of the garage-rock heap with an insane live show and a series of albums that swam in a toxic swamp of early Stones bravado, Velvet Underground darkness, and hotshot punk energy. The Lips’ fifth studio album, 200 Million Thousand, doesn’t mess with success but notably takes a step back into the murkier waters from whence the group came after their comparatively clean previous release, Good Bad Not Evil. Muck-encrusted songs like ‘Big Black Baby Jesus of Today,’ with a sound likened to the Animals playing in a waste dump, and the broken ’50s sock-hop sweat of ‘Drugs’ are what you’d expect, though small stabs at experimentation abound. The foggy trip-hop touches of ‘The Drop I Hold’ and the vaguely Eastern lilt of ‘Old Man’ hint at some growth, but the boys behind Black Lips are too smart to stray too far from the glorious lo-fi wreck they are.
