Black Lips: 'Under The Rainbow', The Middle East And A Good Time Had By All
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
Written by Huw Baines
Black Lips have a hard-earned reputation as one of the few bands left who can deliver their rock ‘n’ roll with a side order of spontaneity. It’s fair to say that it’s rarely quiet when they’re in town.
But, strip away the bluster of piss-soaked shows, look beyond being chased out of India by police after kissing your bandmates on stage, and you’ve got a quartet with great records in their locker.
‘Underneath The Rainbow’, their seventh studio album, is set to arrive on March 17, three years after the Atlanta natives put out ‘Arabia Mountain’. In the intervening period - which equates to one hell of a wait given the prolific nature of their early years - Black Lips have continued to walk to the beat of their own drum.
They don’t stop writing songs and they don’t stop playing shows, but where they choose to do so is pretty much up to them. After a summer spent in assorted muddy fields a couple of years back, the band set out for the Middle East, touching down in, among other places, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq during the autumn of 2012. Along for the ride were filmmaker Bill Cody - who had previously taught in Iraqi Kurdistan - and Lazzy Lung, a Lebanese band.
Injecting a shit-kicking punk band into the Arab Spring is a neat narrative twist, but in reality the band were motivated more by people than politics. “We were just going over there to play, like we’d play anywhere else,” Jared Swilley, the band’s bassist, said. “Germany, Georgia, France or Florida. There was no political thing at all, and none of the kids were really all that political. They just wanted to have a good time, just like everyone else.”
While it may not have been their intention, Black Lips did roll up at a time that will command its place as a turning point in world history. They found warm welcomes, a few religious and political obstacles related to their past - a promoter’s objections to the fact that they had previously played in Israel, a show cancelled due to government cold feet over their Family Tree video - and scared the shit out of their folks.
“It was really, really eye opening,” Swilley said. “None of us have any formal education. I was kicked out of school at a pretty early age. The kind of education you get from just experiencing the world, you can’t really learn anywhere else. It was a really fascinating time to be over there.
“We went after [former Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak was deposed and right before [Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed] Morsi got kicked out. It was a lull between the two uprisings. It was really calm, but two or three days before we went over there was when people stormed the US embassy and set it on fire. Our parents all started freaking out. My mom called the label and our manager, telling ‘em to pull the plug on it and begging us not to go.”
After their return, Cody pieced together footage from the tour to make the aptly-titled Kids Like You And Me doc, while the band turned their focus to the studio. Mark Ronson, who produced ‘Arabia Mountain’, was their choice to helm its follow up, but the British hit-maker was ruled out thanks to a schedule that burst at the seams.
The antidote to their problem came in two parts. Firstly, a call went in to Thomas Brenneck, who came recommended by Ronson and helped to pinpoint the guitar and drum sounds on 'Arabia Mountain'. The second piece of the puzzle was found following a show in Mexico City, some beers and a late night conversation with Patrick Carney, drummer of the Black Keys.
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“I just happened to mention to Patrick that Mark had postponed for a long time and we wanted to get going,” Swilley said. “He just offered to do it with us. It was a bunch of bands, mainly British bands, and we were all staying in the same hotel. It was three or four in the morning in a hotel room and I was like ‘hopefully that wasn’t just late night drunk talk’. It wasn’t. He was still on board.”
Recording was split between Brooklyn, with Brenneck, and Nashville, where Carney was behind the desk. “I think they did a real good job with it mixing together,” Swilley said. “Thomas is definitely more hands off, he’s mostly about getting the sound. Other than horn arrangements he didn’t mess with much. Patrick was a little more into it. We brought Patrick more skeletal song structures to build together. The stuff we had with Thomas was, for the most part, written.”
‘Underneath The Rainbow’ doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s very much a Black Lips record, one that calls on drawled melodies, four-way vocals and sweaty, ramshackle punk. It’s not, whatever you might have read, a southern rock album.
“We never make any radical departures, because we’ve never really had a plan for a record,” Swilley said. “We have four writers who are just writing all the time. One of the earlier interviews I said like, joking around, that it’s a southern rock album. They ran with that. We’re southerners and we play rock ‘n’ roll music, but I definitely don’t think it’s a southern rock album.”
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