Black Lips - '200 Million Thousand' (Vice) Released 16/03/09

2009 is evidently the year of the headache inducing record sleeve. First up there was Animal Collectives swirling magic eye piece for 'Merriweather Post Pavilion' and now comes the cover for '200 Million Thousand' the new album from flower punks Black Lips. If you squint hard enough you can make a face out of the black lines but don't stare too long however as you are likely to keel over and start frothing at the mouth. Perhaps it hypnotises you into buying the album?

Hypnotism may well be the only way to get into '200 Million Thousand', however, as it's a challenging and unfocused piece of work. The 2007 album 'Good, Bad Not Evil' is a much overlooked effort and a good summation of Black Lips. They are good: making Stones-esque garage 'n' blues acid fried pop seemingly held together by the very loosest of threads. They are bad: when they play wild shows that see them getting naked, fighting and even getting deported. But ultimately they are not evil; they just do their thing and care not one iota what anyone else thinks about it.

This attitude manifested itself in the past in a typically nihilistic punk style, but on '200 Million Suns' the loose threads have snapped and left the band who thrived on 'unprofessionalism' exposed. Recorded in a disused Atlanta art gallery, the fifteen tracks on the album are wildly varied in quality, from the experimental to the trippy by way of acid-fried jams and the occasional glimmer of hope. '200 Million Thousand' sounds as if it is at war with itself. Starting off in free-fall with the woeful opening trio of 'Take My Heart', 'Drugs' and 'Starting Over' you would not be blamed for suspecting a rogue tribute band had snuck their demo tape into the box where your Black Lips CD should be.