If nothing else, The Black Lips are a party

I don't want to talk about the switch to Vice, I don't want to talk about that New York Times documentary. I don't even feel like telling you about what their music sounds like. Attempts at describing noises are pretty futile. If you can't find anything else to talk about, then shut up and play me the record. The Black Lips, at their very best and very worst, will always be a party. Whether you're the type they'd invite is another matter. If you like Roky Erickson, the Standells, Gerry Roslie's yowling and shaking your ass liberally, you will like the Black Lips. If you like Liberace, Wizzard and are still thrilled by the idea of pop rocks and Coca-Cola, chances are you, too, know how to have a good time and will enjoy listening to the Black Lips. If you like Jandek and weep at the thought of silk flowers, then you probably peaked on the good-time scale in infancy, and it might do you some good to get out and see the Black Lips some time soon. So I'd say pretty much everyone is on the list.Last Friday's performance proved celebratory indeed, though it wasn't as wild or as floor-breaking as some accounts I'd heard of the band in the past. The stage at the Ottobar is just too high. Considering I've missed them about nine thousand times over the past three years, I shouldn't complain. They made great use of the venue's lighting system, lending the bar a delightfully bizarre disco-fever atmosphere during a show that ideally would have taken place within the squalid, greasy workings of an overheated `68 Cadillac engine.Everyone was having a damn good time. And for Christ's sake, dancing! I mean, we still got to see Cole try to keep his wig -- a poorly permed mop exactly the same color as his own hair -- on while yelling the breakdown to "Hippie Hippie Hoorah" in that garbled French, even though it meant forgoing some of the loogies he'd sent shooting three feet into the air. And we still got to see him and Ian engage in some Kodak-worthy bromance, when that damn wig slipped off again, in a viscous motion dropped downward and righted itself to the world by a few lucky strands from the low frets of Ian's guitar. It hung there half the length of "Juvenile," after which Cole plucked it from the stage and again unsuccessfully perched it atop his normal long hair, and Ian spit out a remarkably sized loogie.Tracks off We Did Not Know the Forest Spirit Made the Flowers Grow and Let It Bloom accounted for most of the set, complete with all of the looped sound effects and cracked echoing on the records. Except for a sped-up "Not a Problem," the songs stayed pretty true to the recordings. The band also showcased "Buried Alive" off its newest LP, which I mistook for a cover of "Mother's Little Helper," and am probably missing some really important piece of information regarding this link.Although they were opening, the Black Lips drew more drunks and vagrants to the floor than did the Ponys. I kind of miss what the Ponys used to sound like, which was neither "alternative" nor made me think of Billy Corgan. I stuck around until they played a few tracks off Laced with Romance, and left a bit disheartened when they went back into whatever it is they're doing now. Still, I was happy to have seen the Black Lips in such uninhibited splendor, and absolutely enthused over such a splendid strobe light, before the hellish maelstrom that is Vice Records -- I'm not gonna say it.