Band: The Black Lips
Release: Underneath The Rainbow (LP)
Release Date: 17th March 2014
The Atlantan based Black Lips are a quartet who have been knocking around for 15 years. In that time they have produced six studio albums, shifting and refining their sound to keep even their most stalwart fans guessing. ‘Underneath the Rainbow’, their seventh full length effort, is no different, and presents a mixed grab-bag of indie, psychedelia, country and blues influences.
Opening track ‘Drive By-Buddy’ kicks off with a rolling country rhythm that mosey’s along, complete with a washboard somewhere in the background layers, before stepping into a slightly more up-tempo chorus featuring the gloriously cheesy line ‘hangin’ on a broken T-bird hood’. The song closes out with a slightly off-key, sleazy guitar solo. This is one of the few shades of the band’s original garage-punk roots to appear on the album, the other being the sometimes wayward vocals that slip off key slightly, prime examples being ‘Smiling’ and ‘Do the Vibrate’. This isn’t jarring or a necessarily bad thing, it is just an honest and expressive stylistic choice that is definitely DIY punk.
The album is quite pacey, the songs are all relatively short, most barely scraping the three and a half minute mark. There’s a distinctly retro vibe across many of the tracks on offer. ‘Make You Mine’ has a definite 60’s vibe to the chorus, fused with a good-time indie rhythm and even a fiddle solo thrown into the bargain. ‘Funny’ comes with a huge wide-on for the Rolling Stones and a moody, bassline-driven groove among it’s many layers.
‘Boys in the Wood’ is the stand out track, it’s low and lazy bluesy groove and perfect psychedelic guitar tone is a treat for the ear holes. There’s a wealth of interesting instrumentation on the record, from brass on ‘Boys …’ to the aforementioned washboard and fiddle as well as glockenspiel (‘Waiting’), tambourine (‘Dandelion Dust’) and whistling (‘I Don’t Wanna Go Home’). The songs are often very complexly layered for what appears to be deceptively simple retro inspired rock.
This is a rewarding and interesting album, sticking close to it’s southern inspired old-school blues-rock stylings without becoming a tedious one trick pony. Although not sky-splittingly incredible, reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow, Black Lips latest effort definitely proves just being underneath it ain’t no bad thing.
6/10
Reviewer – Jay Hampshire
