Black Lips: Manchester Deaf Institute: 18.12.2009
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The Manchester Deaf Institute, with its’ twee, misshapen interior is one of many city venues whose walls just ache for the title of kookiest bar. The only logical explanation is that there’s a profound dialogue between the everlasting icon of a grim industrial town, and its pacification with pseudo exotic bars. Tonight we wait for Black Lips to deliver an added taste of the supremely exotic; guys who celebrate lack of parents and non-specific gender promiscuity to raise the world’s young complacent heads.
As their brilliant fifth album, '200 Million Thousand', was leaked on the Internet about a week ago, the audience are fully prepared for live renditions of scratchily produced genre skipping screechin’ psych-garage-pop, which offers intense tastes of Wu Tang (The Drop I Hold) to country chorus. This evening the crowd are met with tracks from the new album that are truly stamped with Black Lips ambiguities, with free flow from song to song so you never can decipher which is surely which. This disorientation, matched by Cole’s Mexican get-up and eyes that dart from midnight reveller to corner repeatedly, aids a slur of the brilliant old rockin’ Old Man, and Buried Alive.
Unsurprisingly, they only play two tracks from their pop album Good Bad Not Evil, Oh Katrina! and It Feels Alright, that are offered for the members of the audience that remain preoccupied with their most traditionally uplifting tracks to date. The slurring of such typical Black Lips lyrics such as: ‘My head, is spinnin’, it feels, alright, I’ve got a clean shirt and my shoes are nice’ stands as a stark comparison against their extravagant, experimental instrumental recordings, and we see with …Not Evil, the Black Lips have successfully injected a mix of crazed psych-pop and youthful lyrics into the mainstream to stir some ferocity around on the British tour map.
The band resist the banalisation of rock ‘n’ roll by injecting a bit of magic and danger into the bloodstream and encouraging a sense of rebellion and ferocity that isn’t mindless. Apparently they performed homosexual acts in front of a crowd on their Indian tour, liberally sloshing piss around and repetitively mooning onlookers. The crowd in Manchester that evening, having read the incessant ‘hype’ surrounding rock band Black Lips, anxiously awaited the same treatment; any splashings and obnoxious chanting would have been welcomed, as, if we’ve forgotten, it’s in the nature of rock.
No one got sprayed with piss, but the audience did the band’s work in terms of showmanship. Black Lips enjoyed the audience’s onslaught as individuals poured onstage for stage dives and one security guard even got himself involved, albeit only to crush a reveller in the crowd. The audience provided enough energy for the band, and evidently indie alt rock fans have been waiting for this opportunity to rock out for a while.
Words: Alice White
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