Black Lips – 200 Million Thousand
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For a band famed for their energy and crazy live shows where anything can happen, sadly, ’200 Million Thousand’ feels slow and a tad predictable.
From the very first track, ‘Take my heart’, Black Lips seem like they’re going to build this into something huge and exciting, but for the most part, the album moves along at its own pace, not really building, but plateauing at “slightly lively” for the majority.
At the every end this all changes though, the last real track, 14, ‘I Saw God’ and the album finally builds to the magnificent and demented crescendo that it had teased at for so long, this track is powerful and lifting, and really made me glad to have listened to the whole thing.
While most of the album is always interesting lyrically and the style and complex garage punk feel of the music is as great as ever, it just feels like more of the same from the Atlanta band and the album chugs along slowly before really reaching its magnificent high point, if you’re going to listen to any tracks on this album, you really have to listen to the whole things, this isn’t a party album that you can stick a few singles of on in the background.
Be sure to check out “Melt Down” at the end, its one of those annoying hidden track style 3 minutes of silence before the song starts things that really the digital age has rendered useless as I could see it there from the start, but I digress, this, apart from its hidden nature, was my favourite song on the album, its brutal and its fun.
Its also a perfect microcosm for ’200 Million Thousand’, for half its length, nothing very interesting is happening, then, it all explodes out at once and makes you glad you waited.
