Black Lips – Good Bad Not Evil reissue review

From Georgia, the (then) quartet Black Lips seemed to rise without a trace; despite Good Bad Not Evil being their fourth album, only a handful of initiates were to that point aware of the band’s wild and hard earned reputation for outrageous behaviour, an exotica that live included chickens and drinking each other’s urine.

Cliche or bad dream take your pick, but when they belatedly emerged from their chaotic chrysalis Cole Alexander and friends seemed like the finished article, if admittedly a weird one. Good Bad Not Evil was boiled up from the corpse of Lenny Kaye’s classic 1972 compilation Nuggets, stealing the keys to it’s chest full of sixties psychedelia and primitive garage rock, almost going the whole way by sounding like it had been recorded in mono from some buried closet.

That’s said like it was a bad thing, but in a fleeting period during which the American underground appeared to be strong again through the contemporary work of Fucked Up, Les Savvy Fav and the early White Stripes, this formed a wonky benchmark in lo-fi madness. Fancy studio procedures like remastering be damned, all the great stuff – O, Katrina!, Navajo, Veni, Vidi, Vici and the wonderfully putrescent singalong Bad Kids – is still here, along with a clutch of equally (un)wholesome additional material. Pucker up baby, it’s finally time Black Lips gave you a big kiss.

You can read a full review here.