Some say the Black Lips don’t take mantras too seriously.
Blending national anthems with tongue in cheek wails about human death, rebirth, and Indian pow-wows, the Black Lips are a band outside of labels or affiliation, let alone political sensitivity.
“When we were in Palestine at one point playing “˜Johnny be Good,’ which is like the only song that kids recognize, (the crowd) started chanting this Hamas terrorist chant over “˜Johnny be Good’ … we thought that was pretty funny,” said Cole Alexander, Black Lips’ front man.
Even in sporadic visits into the Middle East with an armful of children and a full mustache, Alexander remains neutral.
“We don’t really tell people what they should think … we’ll make observations or whatever, but for the most part we’re not opinionated about it,” Alexander said.
Black Lips, playing Saturday at the Echoplex, chooses instead to dredge up the raw energy of Peruvian punk bands like Los Sitios and the psych-folk revivalism of “flower punk” into a sort of eerie black-continent mysticism that remains unique to their own collection of albums. The Black Lips’ music itself forms a sort of spiritual center like a mix between the Wailing Wall and the Bermuda Triangle.
With the release of their latest album, “Good Bad Not Evil,” the band bridges narratives of faux childhood delicacy and screeching ballads to a New Orleans girl named Katrina with stories of love, fluids, and all things eerily ethereal.
Aside from their new forays in storytelling and themes of religious conquest, the same manner of mind-trip energy still remains lurking behind each tarnished pop song or stomping rhythm.
Lead singer Alexander even claims to practice his own brand of “Mentalism,” or a psychological technique by which to read people, detect lies, and generally psych-out his audience by “stretching his hands out like a witch during a performance … to create an aura, a mental aura.”
If that isn’t pleasantly unnerving enough, their style of music in itself pays homage to this sort of bacchanal ceremony. Black Lips places sneering vocals on top of pounding, tribal rhythms that randomly break out into shrieks of man and guitar ““ music inviting ritualistic audience participation. Their live shows seem to pay testament to this ecstatic overflow, like a southern congregation choosing to vomit in tongues rather than speaking in them.
Alexander describes a particularly memorable instance of overflow at a show in Kansas:
“The show starts off, this guy barfs all over the stage and there’s people like sliding in it, because it’s really slippery … it’s horrible, I have trouble breathing in because it’s like noxious fumes,” Alexander said. He also reminisces about a time when a fan ran naked through the crowd and when one fan hit another with a chair.
In essence, the Black Lips truly don’t care about much outside of their own music. Whether they represent a new movement in “flower punk” (“We don’t want to be macho and like “˜du du du du du,’ so a flower is kind of wimpy,” he said), a religious gathering of fist-fights and physical violence, or a cultish sort of mysticism, they couldn’t care less about classification. In a way of tribute, they’ve managed to cull the best of discordant garage rock, anthemic bhangra chants, and 60’s acid jams without losing their identity. Their own music remains their mantra, so seeing it live is essentially the only way to glimpse their pleasantly crafted living hell.