Good Bad Not Evil

Despite their reputation as venue trashing avatars of sweaty debauchery and roaring garage rock chaos, the Black Lips possess a strikingly appealing pop sensibility and a knowing sense of humor that charmingly offsets their hedonistic poses. This is a band whose freewheeling carelessness reminds the listener that rock and roll is first and foremost about unbridled fun and youthful exhilaration. On Good Bad Not Evil they channel the gleeful incompetence and snarling but cutely precocious badinage of a thousand nameless teen combos from decades past. Thankfully the Black Lips are not content to be pegged as also ran garage revivalists, and the chiming chords of “Cold Hands”, and the hummable chorus of the stomping “Bad Kids” owe as much to New Zealand pop merchants The Clean as to the garage staples to whom the band are constantly compared. Though the album is marred by a few half-hearted excursions into moonshine drenched faux-country, the Black Lips sense of fun is so contagious that one can’t help but snicker along with the maudlin honky-tonk of “How Do You Tell A Child Someone Has Died.” While other bands drown in po-faced self-seriousness, the Black Lips continue to create albums full of transcendent trash with a laugh and a smile.