When it comes to snot-nosed punks cracking wise, the Black Lips are right up there with the immortals—The Dictators, the Angry Samoans, Kix, the Dead Milkmen, the Beastie Boys even. Since their formation in 1999 the outré garage rockers from Atlanta, Georgia have been turning out irreverent anthems—“Bad Kids” and “Juvenile” being amongst the best of them—for fellow delinquents the world over. Their music is a deliriously funny salute to the proposition that stages are meant to be pissed from, and the best example of this is 2007’s “maybe” live LP, Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo.
Purportedly recorded at a club in Tijuana, Mexico, Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo is one of the most riotous live albums I’ve ever heard, and in the end it doesn’t much matter if it was recorded in the tequila-reek of a dissolute cantina in the Gateway to Mexico or in a studio in Kalamazoo. (The dispute over the recording’s actual provenance is likely to be waged forever, from YouTube—on which you can find what looks to me like some convincing film footage—to your house.) People sing sea shanties and howl in Spanish, a mariachi trumpet gets played, glass gets broken, songs stop halfway through, and there’s a lot of alarming electrical crackle. And if you listen real hard you can hear the Black Lips crank out one great acid-tinged garage rock tune after another. But don’t sweat the lo-fi sound quality—it’s every bit as good as that on their studio albums!
Both Cole Alexander and Jared Swilley—high school pals who got tossed out their senior year in the wake of the Columbine Massacre for posing a quote subculture danger unquote—have nasal voices that remind me of the Dead Milkmen’s Joe Genaro, and when they sing together, which is often, it’s a treat. And not only do the lads in Black Lips have a knack for crafting simple but catchy garage rock songs with zip, they have the swagger and just enough chops to fill them out. Which is more than I can say for most of the Dead Milkmen’s oeuvre.