Guitarist Ian St. Pe has a soft Southern drawl and a great deadpan. "Y'all cool?" he drawls at one point, earlier he'd ask "Y'all gone mad?".
Perhaps he audience, a bunch of 20 something hooligans, moshing, stage driving, pouring beer, stripping off their wife beaters or down to their bras, stealing bassist Jared Swilley's mic, throwing beer at the band and each other, and generally acting like assholes and post-juvenile delinquents, are not quite all there.
Yea, they be mad.
But Black Lips are madder.
The legendary Athens, Ga punk rock band's Every Night Is Friday Night tour tore Bowery Ballroom apart with an hour plus of dynamic swamp rock: a heavy vibing, no nonsense mix of blues workouts, power pop and bone rattling, heads down rock and roll. If rock and roll is now a niche art form, then Black Lips are outsiders par excellence; they crash the borders of rock and roll and let it throw them and us about the stage. Some of their songs are great, some less, so but they are always tremendous fun to share.
The "Every night is Friday night" gig starts half an hour late but makes up for it with a full tilt momentum through the highlights of their career and a handful of tracks off their latest, the Mark Ronson produced Arabia Nights and culminating in an encore of "Too Much Monkey Business:", Chuck Berry's ode to the GI Bill -oddly appropriate, right?
They hit all the highlights: "Bad Kids", "Dirty Hands" "Oh Katrina" and hit song in waiting "Go Out And Get It"; the psychedelic out to "Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah" and ended the main set with a punky "MIA". Black Lips reputation precedes them but you don't do this for a decade without professionalism rubbing off, and this was not teenage kids, this was mid-20s pros and they came across as such. Despite Jared crowd surfing towards the end, they were maintaining their composure while the fans were losing theirs. Yeah, booze, drugs, lynchings in India, but the day in and day out of touring for years on end can't be maintained if you are doing what you are singing. Black Lips dodge glasses and purr through the set with complete aplumb.
It is quite weird and quite fun to watch: fans keep a running battle with the bouncers and Black Lips are somewhere between amused and indifferent. Maxwell's next they seem to be thinking.
