Black Lips – Season of the Peach (Fire) (13th Floor Album Review)
Season of the Peach, the latest album from Black Lips, kicks the doors down from the first warped note. What follows is a relentless 14-track, 40 minute, loud, high-speed ride through death wishes, celebrity name-drops, and glorious chaos.
Twenty-five years into their career of busted amps, on stage firecrackers, and cross continental mayhem, the Atlanta flower-punks still sound like a band that thrives on danger and sweat. This is a reminder that the Lips know exactly how wild they can get.
Cole Alexander (guitar, vocals) and Jared Swilley (bass, vocals) started the band when crashing basement parties and shocking dive-bar crowds in suburban Georgia at the end of the last century. Over the years the line up has settled into Jeff Clarke (guitar, vocals), Oakley Munson (drums, vocals), and Zumi Rosow (baritone sax, theremin, vocals), forging a band that can pivot from garage-rock slugfest to spaghetti-western dreamscape. Two guitars snarl, bass and drums punch holes in the mix, and Rosow’s oversized sax bellows like a second bass or screams like a siren. Her theremin provides eerie, touch-free waves of sound which add a sci-fi shimmer; turning dusty Americana into something haunted and otherworldly.
The album disorientates from the start: The Illusion Part Two opens the record while Part One closes it, a reversed bookend that sets a dark, hall of mirrors mood. Over cymbal crashes and ghost-organ swells, Clarke warns, “you reach for the sky but it’s an illusion… but there is nothing.” That circular structure frames a set obsessed with death, futility, and the strange carnival of fame. Across the record the band name-checks everyone from Oprah to Tupac to Jean Genet, and even themselves, pinning pop culture into their nihilistic collage.
Musically, Season of the Peach is pure Black Lips whiplash. Zulu Saints staggers like a drunk trying to prove they are sober; a country-tinged march spiked with whip cracks, flute, and bells. Sx Sx Sx Men lurches through semi-shouted, semi-whispered lines, while guitars and drums flirt with collapse. Rosow takes centre stage on Wild One, a spaghetti-western lament where violin and theremin swirl around her scorched vocal: “take a deep breath and you try to feel alive.” The song is cinematic and fatalistic, with its lyrics providing the album’s juicy title.
Throughout the band hits hard with wayward verve. So Far Gone is fuzz-drenched garage rock turned up; Rosow wailing “I’ve been so far gone for so long” while the drums hammer relentlessly. Tippy Tongue turns a sensual lyric, “let me taste the touch of the top of the tip of your tongue” into a frenzied, noise-splattered rave-up. Even slower cuts like Hatman and Happy Place swerve and shift, their tempo and texture mutating until the floorboards warp and creak.
Threaded through the racket is surprising cohesion. Every member writes, yet the themes lock together: executions (Baptism in the Death House), media obsessions (Kassandra), apocalyptic Americana (Judas Pig with its “child lepers and astral freaks”). The theremin and sax tie it all into a single strange universe; the low brass growl anchoring the bottom end, spectral oscillations hovering like ghosts above the mix.
While their early 2010s high-water marks like Arabia Mountain bottled a moment, this is a record where Black Lips are still energetically twisting rockabilly, country, punk, psychedelia, and more – like the clock’s about to run out. The closing Illusion Part One circles back to the opener’s warning: “but there’s nothing today… so you lay down and die,” and leaves that bleakness hanging.
Twenty-five years on, The Black Lips remain gloriously contradictory, cathartic, and challenging: as self contained as ever, and crashing through the walls. Season of the Peach tells us that the ride is crooked, the end inevitable, and the music still wild enough to shake the foundations.
John Bradbury
Season Of The Peach is out now on Fire Records
