black lips - we did not know the forest spirit made the flowers grow

I can't remember anything from my first listens to Black Lips and We Did Not Know The Forest Spirit Made The Flowers Grow. I was already well-aware of the Black Lips, and was in fact worshiping Let It Bloom on an almost daily basis, but these albums...they were something different altogether. I may as well have been listening to static, with the occasional snare hit or bellowing drunken yell to remind me that there were real people behind it. It was a sludgy wall of nothingness. Awesome nothingness, but still nothingness.

After the initial few empty listens, I all but abandoned the Lips' early material, focusing on Let It Bloom, Good Bad Not Evil, and what the hell--even 200 Million Thousand. I loved it all, except for those early monstrosities. They just seemed out of place compared to the rest of them, part of a strange period where the band just got trashed and beat the shit out of their guitars without trying to actually write songs. It was too much.

Revisiting these albums after all those years, it's incredible how different my reaction is. These albums sound fucking pristine compared to some of the stuff I listen to now. The songwriting throughout both records is surprisingly solid, if deliriously sloppy. What sounded at first like a bunch of guys punching their guitars with their amps turned up to 11 now sounds like excellent Back From The Grave copycat work, played a hell of a lot louder by people nearly too drunk to hold guitars, let alone play them.

It's still raw as hell, no question, and it would be interesting to hear this material with the fuzz turned down a couple notches, but it's far from overwhelming. If anything, it's just downright fun. There's no menace here. It's loud and messy and a bit deranged at times, but these guys are just doing what they wanna do, living life close to the edge, losing their footing every now and getting real goddamn close to falling off that edge, but still staying on somehow. Which is a pretty great description of what it's like seeing these guys live.

They may have gotten a song on (500) Days Of Summer and hired Mark Ronson to produce their last album, but their heart and soul is still with that early, trashy sound. Even "Bad Kids" gets the same boozy, chaotic treatment when they're onstage (if they still play that song on tour anymore). They continue to get more and more professional in the studio, but onstage it's still business as usual--get fucked up, kick out the jams, make some kids move around a bit, insert rock cliche here, then wake up and do it again the next day.

Most bands that try to name their own genres end up failing spectacularly, but I can't think of a better phrase to describe the Black Lips than "flower punk," and Forest Spirit is flower punk as fuck. This album benefits monumentally from a vinyl replay (clear blue, first pressing, 500 copies, swag), and it often sounds like the pops and hiss were mixed right in there from the very beginning. It's a shame that it gets ignored for the later material, along with Black Lips, but at the same time, this just isn't gonna appeal to everyone. Which kinda sucks. The world needs more shitty music. Always has, always will. And people who listen to shitty music are the best kind of people in the world.