It sounds like an ’80s buddy cop movie. Him, the handsome superproducer for whom the word ‘dapper’ was invented. Them, the drug-addled, stale-semen-smelling garage rock-tards from Georgia. “You’re putting us on assignment together?” barks [a]Mark Ronson[/a] at his commanding officer. “OK with me, boss,” says [a]Black Lip[/a]s’ singer Jared Swilley. That’s not quite how the strangest musical hook-up of 2011 happened, we expect, but you get the point.
It’s a matter of no little wonderment how this pants-forsaken four-piece bring such joy and freshness to their fuzz-toned debauches. Worryingly, their last record – ‘200 Million Thousand’ – seemed to be running low on that devil-may-care spirit. Though by no means a disaster, they needed to hit back, and ‘Arabia Mountain’ doesn’t disappoint.
‘Family Tree’ is a rollicking, leaky banger of an opening track, hair combed with engine grease and zany sax parping away in the background – chalk that one up to Ronson, then. Speaking of whom, the arch swinger’s touch on the record is apparent but surprisingly discreet, his trademark brass applied only sparingly and a hint of Theremin bringing surfy, ‘Good Vibrations’ overtones to ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Bone Marrow’.
The former’s wreckheads-in-an-art-gallery theme perfectly sums up the band’s class-clown appeal (“K-hole at the Dali/Seeing the unknown”), and is one of their best flat-out tunes since ‘O Katrina’. ‘Spidey’s Curse’ talks about Spider-Man getting touched up as a kid and sounds like [a]The Beach Boys[/a] – not the sacrosanct, tortured-genius version beloved of [a]Animal Collective[/a], but the feckless thrill-seekers behind ‘Surfin’ USA’.
‘Go Out And Get It’’s lyrics advocate a common-sense approach to fun (“Ice cream at the corner store, you get two for just a dollar more”) and the wicked ‘Dumpster Dive’ takes the band’s trashy aesthetic to literal new lows with a charming tale of rooting in bins. The chorus is pure ‘Beggars Banquet’-era Stones; a peach.
Even the bad-vibes tracks are more fun this time around –‘Mr Driver’ comes on like a creeping dose of the fear and ‘You Keep On Running’ sounds like Jeffrey Lebowski’s worst acid flashbacks. But even more miraculous is how the band’s idiot-savant shtick hasn’t worn thin over time, possibly because it isn’t a shtick at all. Truly, these guys are God’s own creatures.
Alex Denney