Atlanta's Black Lips give Chicago some southern loving

April 1, 2010, at Logan Square Auditorium

By Charlotte Loftus
Published: April 3rd, 2010 | 11:00pm

Maybe I grew up listening to too many stories of Iggy Pop slathering his naked body in peanut butter onstage. Maybe it was an off night. Either way, it would be next to impossible for the Black Lips to live up to the hype frenzy that’s been swirling around their live show for the past few years. There can’t be onstage urination and naked make-out sessions every night, after all. And on April Fool’s night in Chicago, there were no such antics to be had.

As for sound check: we don’t need no stinking sound check! This meant voice and bass were nearly indistinguishable in tone, which actually lent itself neatly to the Black Lips’ particular brand of scuzzy hallucinogenic garage rock. If the Byrds and Redd Kross had downed excessive amounts of beer and then shagged in a recording studio, it might sound a bit like the Black Lips. They list ‘70s Peruvian punk band Los Saicos as a primary influence, and reviews have listed everybody from the Vaselines to the Troggs as having a hand in shaping the band’s sound.

At precisely 10:30 p.m., the crowd started stomping their feet and chanting for the band. Bass player Jared Swilley shouted “Hey crew, how you doing, y’all good?” before launching into a set of old favorites and songs from their most recent full-length 200 Million Thousand, out now on Vice Records.

For “Dirty Hands” (off of 2006’s Let It Bloom on In the Red Records) and “Bad Kids” (off of 2007’s Good Bad Not Evil featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer), piles of kids came onstage to dance, shirt-strip, and shout both lyrics and stray obscenities into the microphone.

The crowd up front was crowd-surfing, jumping onstage, grinding with the band members (mainly lead guitarist Ian Saint Pé, for some reason. Maybe it was the captain’s hat and wig changes throughout the night?), and throwing up their middle fingers. Just a few rows back the crowd indifferently sipped on PBR’s and chatted with friends.

It felt like an approximation of a house show: a lot of white boys the same age as the band members getting hyped up about seeing their friends onstage—and everybody else slightly bored by the whole spectacle.

For the encore, after a few minutes of shouting “one more song,” the band came back out to play a new song off of their sixth album, which will be released later this year. They also delivered on a version of “Wild Man” from their 2004 7” Live at the Jam Club and originally recorded by ‘60s garage-psyche band the Tamrons.

Maybe the relative sedateness was an elaborate hoax. At the end of the show, Swilley shouted “Happy April Fool’s Day! We’re gonna go eat some Doritos,” while guitarist Cole Alexander showed the back of his guitar, onto which was electrical tape shaped into the words “Thank you.”

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For more photos, visit Venus Zine’s Flickr page

Black Lips official site

Black Lips MySpace

Vice Records