Black Lips play Orpheum in Ybor City next Thursday, March 26. Here's my feature/interview with the band:
"I want other bands like us to become as successful as we are so they can stay as shitty as we are," says Jared Swilley, bass player for Black Lips, talking on a cell phone as the band rolls out of Omaha in a van.
So why is Swilley standing up for shitty music? You have to understand his definition of such: music that comes from a raw, unfiltered place, that's not recorded using the latest computer technology, that doesn't concern itself with whether the vocals and guitars are exactly in tune or the rhythms are perfectly in time.
"I like the human side of music," he says. "I love imperfections and mistakes. Otherwise the cyborgs win. Look at 'Louie Louie.' It was No. 1 hit [actually a No. 2 in 1963] and it was sloppy and had the biggest vocal flub."
"Louie Louie" would be a fair reference point for the music of Black Lips, an Atlanta quartet that's been together since the early part of this decade. It sounds like the stuff made in basements and garages by self-taught kids in the 1960s, recorded off-the-cuff with lots of reverb and little regard for squeaky-clean sonics. Black Lips have dubbed their music "flower punk."
"When me and [guitarist] Cole [Alexander] were pretending to be in a band early on, we listened to The Germs and they couldn't play their instruments at all," Swilley says. "When we really started playing guitar, we emulated Link Wray. He had these guitar riffs that were cool and tough and easy to play. We were into the punk stuff, but we were always into the '60s stuff."
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2009.