Black Lips are a band that should really get more credit as musicians. Their stage shows may be a complete mess of sexual confusion and projectile vomit, but they’re far from a gimmick band. They’re professionals after all, playing those wonderfully slimy, throwback garage rock riffs leading into fun little ditties about incest or violence or something similarly offensive. Great 2-3 minute songs that happen to be about taboo subjects. It’s not high concept music. It’s more like a revival of the kind of an underground, DIY, rock and roll scene that hasn’t thrived since the late sixties. Think the Velvet Underground with the same amount of homosexuality, only none of the art student ethos or auteur songwriting. The Stooges if they were all members of the Manson family. ‘Flower Punk’ is the phrase they use to define their sound. One part hippy, one part anarchy. It’s a good analogy.

Well, Black Lips are back with a new album, and it’s a solid one. Not a great one, but a worthy purchase. Their last album was the Mark Ronson-produced ‘Arabian Mountain’ in 2011, which by rights should have been Black Lips’ big break-through album, but I guess some bands just aren’t meant for stardom. Could you imagine these guys on some Top of the Pops type show, throwing up all over the stage and exposing their junk to the audience? Personally I think that’d make for some damn fine television. I doubt the networks would agree.

If you haven’t jumped on the Black Lips bandwagon before, some explaining is probably in order. The ‘projectile vomit’ thing comes from the fact that guitarist/vocalist Cole Alexander has a medical condition that causes him to, well, chunder. A lot. Add that to the primal, rock and roll hedonism that these guys purvey, and you get a live Black Lips gig. This band was famously chased out of India a few years back after indulging in some Jim Morrison-esque onstage nudity, and engaging in “homosexual acts” – illegal at the time in that country (Alexander and fellow guitarist Ian St Pe made out a little during the show, according to the reports. They do that from time to time.). Facing arrest, they managed to lay low and get the hell out to the more liberal Berlin, continuing on their world tour. The live antics have cooled in recent years (they were seriously wild in the early days – apparently as a front for not being great musicians yet), though you can still expect some punk rock pranks these days.

The first thing we got from ‘Underneath the Rainbow’ was the video for ‘Boys in the Wood’, which as a song is a slow, yet menacing bluesy thing, with an absolutely disgusting (in a good way) vid, directed by Matt Swinsky and the ATL Twins. Patrick Carney of the Black Keys co-produced the album, and his fingerprints are left clearly on this song especially, which was written as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd and illicitly home-brewed substances. Extreme violence, drug use and hints of Deliverance-style rape. All in a day’s work.

As far as the actual album goes, ‘Drive By Buddy’ is an upbeat, yet murky opener, carried on by a thumping beat and some slinky guitars. “As long as you’re just screaming, it’s all good/We’re hanging on a broken T-bird hood…” And the follower kicks right into it with the first verse, demanding the listener to call the cops and tell them to pick him up. Just don’t act too concerned. It’s called ‘Smiling’, and dammit, he just wants to have fun, and maybe make a few friends in the impending police raid.

Track 3, ‘Make You Mine’ has a bit of a country edge to it, but it is country as interpreted by the Rolling Stones (if you’ve heard ‘Dead Flowers’, you know the Stones do country pretty darn well). The vocal harmonies are definitely channelling some vintage Jagger/Richards, with the swaggery lead and the drunkenly warbled backup vocals. It’s just good ol’ fashioned, toe tappin’ fun. And so much of what Black Lips do is about just having fun. They’re not trying to make the next Pet Sounds or Sgt Pepper. They don’t care enough to try that hard. In fact ‘Funny’ is a bit of a throwaway ode to not taking stuff too seriously. Feel like getting ya dick out on stage, screw it, just do it. Life’s a ball, dude, if you let it be so.

A good gauge when judging a new record is the foot-tapping test. If you find your feet uncontrollably bobbing up and down, your fingers drumming a beat on the nearest solid object and your head rocking gently back and forth, you’ve got yourself a keeper in the stereo. The kind of album that’ll survive multiple iPod synch filtering. ‘Underneath the Rainbow’ passes that test for sure, though it doesn’t always offer a whole lot more. ‘Dorner Party’ and ‘Justice After All’ are decent filler, with good choruses, though forgettable by the end of the spin cycle. But ‘Boys in the Wood’ is a great song. It’s the first track that really mixes things up. “Ain’t nobody foolin’ around”. This is Black Lips really strutting it. There’s a freakin’ horn section, man, and, by God, it works. ‘Arabian Mountain’ had a number of these moments. This album doesn’t quite reach that level of creative overflow, but it has its flashes. Also ‘Arabian Mountain’ had this really cool sorta windy, desert feel to things, from the ayahuasca trip imagery of the album cover to the surf rock feel of a number of songs. ‘Underneath the Rainbow’ leans more towards the suburban.

‘Waiting’ starts uninspired, only to kick into a great hook. Then ‘Do the Vibrate’ has an interesting suggestion as to an alternative use of the vibrate function of you cellphone, buried in a menacing loop of that same surf rock guitar riffing that their last album thrived upon. ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Home’ mixes things up again with whistling and tambourines. The opening guitar riff sounds so much like the Stones’ ‘Rip This Joint’ that I almost had to reassess my sanity hearing it (I’ve always felt like I was lying around hungover and shooting the breeze with Keef in that Parisian mansion when listening to ‘Exile on Main St.’).

Yeah, this album plays it pretty safe. ‘Dandelion Dust’ is a bit of the same old again. The last track, ‘Dog Years’ is a great closer though. The ‘woos’ in the background are something I wish they’d used more of. Maybe they just wanted to distance themselves from an already obvious Stones comparison. As if there’s a better band to lift arrangement ideas from?

I dunno, I really liked the album. It’s filthy where it wants to be, and polished where it wants to be, and few bands can pull of that paradox like Black Lips. ‘Under the Rainbow’ isn’t as enjoyable as their last effort, but it’s a welcome addition to the catalogue. Good to see the boys haven’t matured too much.