Well after making some headlines at South by Southwest this year and now releasing their new album, “Good Bad Not Evil”, the Black Lips have been launched from obscurity to indie-rock semi-stardom.

This success is well deserved. The band describes their sound as “flower punk” which to me sounds like some sort of hideous crime against nature, so let me try to do them one better. The sound is definitely punk – the songs are short, the guitars are loud, the vocals are raw and unrefined. But it does go back to the earliest rock roots of punk, punk before it was in opposition to mainstream rock, more when it was just diverging from the family tree of rock and roll. There’s a strong flavor of the 60s psychedelic garage scene here, but with the simplicity of approach that punk is all about. They remind me of the Warlocks a lot, but with some catchier hooks and less navel gazing.

There’s some other stray influences here that keep the band’s sound varied, check out the 60s surf guitar riffs in this video of the song “Cold Hands”:

All of this does not change one basic fact, which is that the band may very possibly be a bunch of crazy idiots. A Black Lips show has in the past been a scene of mayhem and chaos where the bizarre is to expected – urination, vomiting, chickens, spitting on people, etc. And that’s just the band, never mind the crowd. When they first got signed to Vice Records? Live show in Tijuana. They also have a tendency to dress like Indians and, how to put this, go to town on Native American stereotypes. Which ain’t too cool. And yet somehow, I can’t help liking the guys. They are like the bad kid in school who was a complete, irresponsible ass and yet had the unstoppable charisma to stay on everyone’s good side. It really is refreshing in a time when a lot of “punk” bands nowadays spend hours carefully waxing their spikes into place, applying their makeup, and puking out boring, safe pop tunes that only pass as punk by virtue of being really simple. Punk needs to be just on the edge of crazy to be good and the Blacks Lips are right on that edge.

I’ll leave you guys with one more track that I got a kick out of, it’s called “O Katrina”, and it’s about how much said hurricane really sucked. Not exactly Kanye West level political insight going on but it’s something that’s good to say and that I can’t recall any other rock band bringing across so far.

Buy Black Lips’ Good Bad Not Evil at Amazon.com