Black Lips - Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?

Pitchfork 66

The Black Lips have been many things over their 18-year run: insolent garage-rockers and innocent pop balladeers; good-ol’-boy country crooners and bad-trip trainwrecks; lo-fi dirtbags and hi-fi hustlers. But ever since their four-piece line-up solidified in 2004—just in time for their first great record, Let It Bloom—the band always exuded a fraternal, last-gang-in-town sense of solidarity. Their catalog may be defined by dramatic shifts in fidelity and focus from album to album, but you never doubted their commitment to seeing each one through.

Their eighth album, though, is the product of some radically reformulated chemistry. The Black Lips are now a five-piece, only 40 per cent of which—guitarist Cole Alexander and bassist Jared Swilley—appeared on their previous record. Original drummer Joe Bradley (singer of arguably their most enduring anthem) and long-time guitarist Ian St. Pe are gone. Not all of the new faces are actually new—recent addition Jack Hines preceded St. Pe’s tenure in the group—but in addition to recruiting drummer Oakley Munson, the Black Lips also now have a full-time saxophonist in Zumi Rosow to thicken up their sound.

Whatever the reasons for it, the shake-up has altered the course of a band that was approaching a career crossroads. The Black Lips’ previous two records—2011’s Arabia Mountain and 2014’s Underneath the Rainbow—saw them make tentative tip-toes toward the mainstream with the help of some platinum-grade producers: the former tapped Mark Ronson’s retro-pop panache, the latter assumed Patrick Carney’s Black Keys bounce. But neither record really elevated the Black Lips beyond their club-level/cult-act station. And so with Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?, they essentially say “fuck it” and indulge their every scatterbrained whim. Like its immediate predecessors, the new album boasts some familiar names in the liner notes: Sean Ono Lennon served as producer, his mom provides (barely perceptible) backing vocals, and additional spiritual guidance was provided by Saul Adamczewski of anarchic UK slop-rock outfit Fat White Family.

As its title suggests, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? invites oppositional, Rorschach-test interpretations. It is at once the Black Lips’ most sonically elaborate album and its most aggressively primitive. The band wrap the songs in a cinematic, carnivalesque clamor, but shout themselves hoarse as if they were still trying to hear themselves over a blown-out church-basement PA. Weighing in at 18 tracks, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium. There are overtures and interludes and reprises and spoken-word passages, but no discernible logic holding them together. Which could very well be the point—when a band as notoriously unruly as the Black Lips opt to make a double-album opus, don’t be surprised when they come off like a group of road-tripping teenagers who’ve scored a Groupon for a five-star hotel and opt to take a dump in the bidet.

Following a brief, jazzy intro, the puffed-up Lips come out swinging with “Occidental Front,” a bracing, stormy blast of desert psych that sounds like the “Rawhide” theme rerouted through the Stooges’ Fun House. But the ceaseless paisley-pop stomp of lead single “Can’t Hold On” provides an early indication of this album’s nagging flaw: its tendency to hammer a simple two-minute tune into a laborious four-minute one. The sense of torpor is exacerbated by tossed-off intermission tracks that drag on for as long as the proper songs, as if branding the bloozy scuzz of “Got Me All Alone” and the warbled-out bongo soul of “Interlude: E’lektric Spider Webz” as “interludes” exonerates the band of aimlessly dicking around.

The album’s best songs are tucked onto Side Two. “Squatting in Heaven” imagines an alternate 1960s where the Stones got stuck in the toga-party circuit; “Rebel Intuition” supports the theory that the first punk album ever was Highway 61 Revisited. And then there’s the gleaming, Spector-like “Crystal Night,” the sort of sweetly subversive song that only the Black Lips could pull off. Just as their 2007 standard “O Katrina!” conflated a girl-done-me-wrong narrative with the worst natural disaster in recent U.S. history, here, the Lips set a typical brokenhearted love song against the backdrop of the 1938 Nazi raids that set the Holocaust in motion (thereby adding the gravest of subtexts to otherwise wistful lines like “Do you remember/The snow was falling/And I held you in my arms then we kissed/I think it was November”). The equally winsome “Wayne” has a similarly unnerving effect, its slow-dance swoon disrupted by an eye-opening lyric—“Is it true/Was it them or you/What you said about the man/Strung up by the Klan?”—that suggests the song could very well be about a certain controversial Southern rapper.

But such sublime moments are in scarce supply, as the album gets bogged down by repetitious mid-tempo rave-ups (“We Know”) and sluggish strip-club struts (“Come Ride With Me”) where Alexander overcompensates for the temperate pace by blowing out his vocal cords. Curiously, the closest thing Satan’s graffiti has to a climax is a random cover of the early Beatles classic “It Won’t Be Long.” It envisions what the song would sound like if it was recorded in 1966 instead of ’63, with Swilley lingering on the line “till I belong to you” until his anxious anticipation starts to sound more like a threat. And it’s a subtle reminder of what the Black Lips do so well, teasing the horror out of wholesomeness and recasting golden-age rock’n’roll in a strange, discomfiting light. But it’s a quality that often gets obscured amid this album’s unwieldy, unbridled sprawl. Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.