Black lips arabia mountain rapidshare

It's all to do with how you wear your musical stupidity. If, like say Editors, you wear your stupidity like a mope-grey overcoat with edgy upturned collar thinking that this will grant you place in rock's grim-faced annals, that is the bad kind of moronic. If you wear it, like Black Lips most likely would, with pineapple-print shorts, no shoes, one of those hats with an arrow through the head and a clam shell-bra, then you are my kind of goof.

In truth, though, depth is not what anyone with sense wants from a band like Black Lips. That's why pairing them with the master of millimetres-deep vintage veneer Mark Ronson was something of a stroke of genius. The mild zaniness, Urban Outfitters retro chic and bouncy warmth that characterises his production is a beautiful fit for the good-natured daftness and bad-seed cheek of these Atlantan berks.

They get their skinny weird on with the closing track 'You Keep On Running', a vibed-out garagey howler with Cole Alexander's vocals recorded through woooo a human skull, but truth be told there's nothing scarier on this album than youth-detention order candidates egging your house on Halloween. From the bouncy opener 'Family Tree' via the bawling tribute to a baseball mascot that is 'Noc-A-Homa' to the goofy hymn to freaking out in the gallery of 'Modern Art', 'Arabia Mountain' reeks of youth, fun and summer sweat.

Not that it's thoughtless; it's to Black Lips credit that an intelligent, wickedly funny bunch of guys who are every bit as much aficionados of the 60s weirder corners as The Horrors make knocking out such a tune-packed, consistently great album sound so effortless while never feeling the need to go 'no, look, we're really clever.

If anything's changed here, it's Black Lips' point of emphasis on the Nuggets spectrum: Arabia Mountain draws less from the sinister psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators or the deranged blues of early Beefheart, and more from the toga-party-rockin' likes of the Sonics and the Premiers. So it favors the more amiable aspects of 60s garage-- frathouse-rocking saxophones, songs inspired by comic-book superheroes and baseball mascots, and grooooovy singing saw-- over anti-authoritarian attitudes and fuzzbox abuse.

Black Lips have never been shy about showing off their playful side, but in the past, these moments Let It Bloom 's poignant, poor-boy ballad "Dirty Hands", Good Bad Not Evil 's outsider anthem "Bad Kids", Million Thousand 's sober-up pledge "Starting Over" nicely complemented their more raucous rave-ups, revealing a sincere softer side to the band's notorious delinquent image. With Arabia Mountain exuding a mostly cheeky and cheerful demeanor, you do lose some of the oppositional tension between innocence and insolence that always distinguished Black Lips from the garage-punk pack.

And with a somewhat bloated song tracklist, the album's abundance of open-roof Thunderbird anthems-- "Go Out and Get It", "Time", "New Direction"-- starts to feel somewhat interchangeable. But Arabia Mountain 's chiseled production and considerably tighter songcraft provides a better forum for showcasing the band's subversive sense of humor. The best songs here play up the dichotomy between their retro sound and modern preoccupations: bad acid trips at the Louvre the Yardbirds-ish freakbeater "Modern Art" , exotic fad diets the breezy Beach Boys-via-Ramones romp "Raw Meat" , and post-recession survival tactics the spot-on country-Stones send-up "Dumpster Diving".

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