The more the
Black Lips change, the more they stay the same. They may try to clean up their sound, hire famous producers, and add different influences to their music, but at heart they remain the same bunch of noisy punks from Atlanta who revel in their own variety of messed-up noise, albeit noise that has plenty of buzzed-out guitars and some pretty great tunes. If 2020's Sing in a World That's Falling Apart was an exercise in the
Black Lips' singular strain of country music, 2022's
Apocalypse Love at once finds them in familiar territory and exploring a bunch of new sonic directions. "Operation Angela" is a buoyant pop tune about soldiers for hire, "Sharing My Cream" is a fusion of disco and old-school rap with a lyric that would make
Blowfly proud, "Whips of Holly" throws in some internationalist percussion along with a tale of decadence, and "No Rave" blends a powerfully funky groove with guitar lines right out of the first
Jesus and Mary Chain album. (They're also not done with country music just yet, as a spin of "Stolen Valor" demonstrates.) However, in spite of these sonic detours,
Apocalypse Love is still dominated by the
Black Lips' love of garage-punk melodic structures, vocals that lean toward inspired amateurism, murky mixes with lots of reverb, and lyrics that are pointed and mildly surreal amidst the throbbing music. Nearly two decades on from their debut album, the
Black Lips know what they're doing and are doing it as well as ever, and
Apocalypse Love is a 13-song dispatch from the sonic universe that is theirs and theirs alone. It's impressive how purposefully murky the band can make this music feel when you notice that the tracks are actually pretty coherent, with imaginative layers of sound working in support of the songs, and the passage of time hasn't robbed them of their spirit or significantly bent vision.
Apocalypse Love is as weird as it wants to be, and coming from this band, that's always welcome. ~ Mark Deming