he Black Lips are back with a new album ‘Underneath The Rainbow’ set to be released on March 18th via Vice Records. Meanwhile they are giving us an avant-taste of their seventh record with this new song entitled ‘Boys in the Woods’ that you can listen to below, via Soundcloud.
The track – a wordplay on Boyz N The Hood I suppose? – is a slow-burning kind of song, with bluesy-heavy Southern guitars and a sort of spaghetti-via-the-bayous western atmosphere before a duel in the sun or in the mud. You can still hear the Black Lips’ signature drunken multi-vocal harmonies and at the end the song sound very much like one of their good old tunes. However, bassist Jared Swilley said to Rolling Stone that the band had shifted away from the poppy sound of their 2011 album ‘Arabia Mountain’, as there was ‘more of a Southern rock and country vibe’ within the album: ‘Our main influences [this time] are pretty traditional. It’s roots music,’ he said. But the band also tweeted: ‘Just to clarify, our new album is not a country record, nor is it a southern rock album. It’s Elvis from the waist down.’ And this clarifies a lot of things I must say!
Swilley even added that ‘Boys in the Woods’ was precisely ‘an ode to Lynyrd Skynyrd’, while he seemed to justify lyrics such as ‘doing bathtub drugs and drinking bathtub gin’ by growing up in Atlanta! Hey, I don’t know, I did not grow up in Atlanta, but, at this rhythm, I can tell that this new anthem wasn’t fueled by speed or cocaine.
Interestingly, ‘Underneath The Rainbow’ was partially recorded with the help of Patrick Carney, err… Black Keys, Black Lips, it was a collaboration which was about to happen! Here is the track list of the future album:
01. Drive By Buddy
02. Smiling
03. Make You Mine
04. Funny
05. Dorner Party
06. Justice After All
07. Boys in the Woods
08. Waiting
09. Do the Vibrate
10. I Don’t Wanna Go Home
11. Dandelion Dust
12. Dog Years
