Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
New Black Lips Album: FAIL

In brief: One Million Thousand is just really not very good.

I had really high--though realistic--hopes for this record, but, wow, NOPE. I couldn't even bear to listen to through the entire album on this first listen--i made it to track eight and then switched to something else.

Opener "Take My Heart" was an underwhelming but acceptable garage "Hi there", but I figured they were just getting warmed up. Then, track 2, "Drugs", well, erm sounds like a weirdly boring(/shitty) Clash song. Track 3, "Starting Over" is the pre-release leak track and I do think it's really good, and positioned at third you might not think things are going so badly (despite the fact that these first three songs also sound illogical lined up against one another).... but then it just goes downhill into the deep and expansive depths of ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. "Short Fuse" sounds like Fleetwood Mac (really??), I'll Be With You" sounds like a shitty, unstudied little brother of "Dirty Hands". By the time i got to "Big Black Baby Jesus Of Today" I was just done.

So this is kinda a "wow" to me. It took me a while to get into Black Lips, as I found their earlier stuff to be kind of boring and tuneless and it wasn't until 2007's Good Bad Not Evil that I finally went, "Oh! I see". For the rest of summer and fall 2007, they were my jam, and I even worked backwards into the "live" album and Let It Bloom. But this, well, this new record is more or less a summation of exactly what I didn&'t like about the band in the first place... a weird garage-y snoozefest.

I will try listening to the album a few more times and promise that I hope I'll eventually hear things differently, but I consider it to be a pretty harsh indictment that I don't even want to make it all the way through a new album by a band I (thought I) love.

Labels: disappointment, HATEFUL, old flames, thoughts

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 2/25/2009 12:32:00 PM 1 comments

1 Comments:

hotdoorknobs said...: Need to listen more but my first.5 impression is kind of "it's okay." Not great, not bad. I do definitely like "Starting Over" a lot and remember liking "Short Fuse." Are you saying Fleetwood Mac is a bad thing?? Check yr Last.fm boyo :--); 3/01/2009 09:27:00 PM