Content Hangover No. 6 by: Garrett Crusan

A Portrait Of The Belair Lip Bombs

I have no sense of what makes a good portrait. Because I often attend shows alone and keep mostly quiet, people chat with me sometimes, often as a lead-up to ask for innocent favors: “I gotta piss, hold my spot;” “watch my drink for a second;” and, in rare cases, “can you take a picture of us?” I’m always agreeable to the latter question, and I never disclose my lack of portraiture skill. Inevitably, another favor usually follows: “Can you take another?”

I was in line at Baby’s All Right to see the Aussie indie outfit The Belair Lip Bombs when I was asked to take a photo of two people who were belligerently drunk. The doors hadn’t even opened. It was post-ID-check, and I could see two huge Xs emblazoned on their hands. “It smells like cigarettes in here,” one scoffed, a half-joke. That was me, I admitted. An overblown laugh. I took the photo and handed the phone back to them. They didn’t ask for another, but they continued taking flash photos of each other in line until the doors finally opened, documenting their outfits and enthusiasm—flashy neon, exaggerated fur boots. Behind me, a guy stood in a polo, and awkwardly pleated knee-length khaki shorts. 

When I attended the Lip Bombs’ first ever show in New York less than half a year ago, those who were there to see them (instead of headliners Spacey Jane) were limited and certainly a more predictable audience: pink-haired outsider punks, battle-jacketed scene veterans, the usual fare. Because of the clientele disparity, I felt like maybe I had gotten the venue wrong—they were playing two sold out nights in a row, one at Baby’s, the other at Nightclub 101, so it’s reasonable to think a mix-up could’ve happened. The two venues have ties in upper management, so it’s not uncommon for bands to double-up; poor maintenance of ticketing websites is also not uncommon (see: the dozens of folks who showed up for Ryan Davis And The Roadhouse Band at Music Hall Of Williamsburg believing that it was a performance from the comedian of the same name because of a promo photo mix-up).  

I double-checked my ticket. I was in the right spot. To my surprise, I was commissioned again pro-bono for another photo: the khaki-shorts guy, proudly solo, flashing his e-ticket with a too-white toothy smile.  

One could argue that The Lip Bombs deserve the world’s true and innocent enthusiasm. It was practically standing in line with us. However, something drastic seems to have changed in the months between their New York debut and their New York headlining debut, and it was a mystery I was desperately self-assigned to solve. I’ve never used TikTok, I’m rarely on Instagram—was it a social media blow-up? A playlisted single on New Music Friday? High-profile press coverage—and do people even read music press anymore? 

If I were to snap a portrait of The Belair Lip Bombs in September, the band wouldn’t ever be in focus despite my best efforts; skittishly vibrating on one of New York indie’s more high-profile stages. Now, it seemed that the roles had reversed—the Lip Bombs were in full focus, still and iconified, and the crowd was quivering in suspense. 

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I quickly realized that a near-even split of that sold-out audience were actually there to see Dust, the Lip Bombs’ Australian tour partners. Dust was a strange band to witness—gallingly derivative, unapologetically macho. One song’s verses were practically “Near DT, MI” and another was, ironically, almost a note-for-note homage to early Lip Bombs recordings. That blatant habit of appropriation was seemingly lost on Dust, whose six-foot-five curly-haired front-man was flailing around so calculatedly that it wouldn’t be a shock to think he’d practiced this kind of “expressiveness” in front of a mirror a hundred times over—getting the guitar’s height just right; making sure to grab the mic stand in the right spot so that the sleeves roll up just a little bit; dipping in and out of the light to make sure his social media team could get both well-lit and silhouetted photos for Instagram. 

This macho energy was made even more damming by The Lip Bombs following them in the lineup—frontwoman Maisie Everett is no stranger to calling out male-dominated industry assholes (and real life assholes, too), and to see that they were preceded by a band of assholes was confounding. 

The Lip Bombs, however tight, seemed somewhat anesthetic. Everett’s trademark vocal vigor on cuts like “Look The Part” and “Stay Or Go” were transposed down a couple keys, with her only holding down the bottom half of the harmony. The palpable attitude of lines like “I’d kill a man if he ever made a joke,” were replaced with drowsy half-declarations. These reworkings felt mature, but concessionary—to music, to touring life, maybe to America as a whole. 

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There was a substantial disparity in how some viewed the Lip Bombs’ sophomore LP, Again. Some publications sang its praises, and others, specifically those with an unhealthy attachment to their debut effort Lush Life, smeared it as a bit of a slump. Alongside my adoration for this band stands a resonance with the latter opinion: it’s a fine record of well-performed rock and roll, but lacks the kind of immediacy that made their debut so special. Instead of a follow-up to Lush Life’s portrait of youthful spontaneity, Again seemed to be an attempt to reverse-engineer a feeling that can only be captured in a quick, blurry moment. 

Similar to their performance that night, Again is tightly produced but uninspired. I began to wonder whether their transition to Third Man Records might have had something to do with this switch-up. It’s a huge jump across the pond for a band that spent years working themselves up in a small, local scene overseas. The pressure and intensity of joining an acclaimed American label with a heavy-hitting roster is a perfect witch’s brew for overanalyzing your art into algorithm in a fraught attempt to create something perfect; Everett herself has even mentioned that Again was “a product of more attention to detail [with] more time fine-tuning the songs before recording.” It could also be argued that Again was a portrait of a band in the midst of growing pains, with some members holding tight to their influences while others expanded their horizons. 

I saw a video somewhere in which Everett cites the newest Greg Freeman record as a current influence—that album, Burnover, is a strange, sprawling project that roughhouses with traditional song structure and storytelling to the point of fracture; guitarist Mike Bradvica, however, cites Kings Of Leon as a primary influence, possibly one of the most snoozeable “rock” bands to ever exist. Taste in music is crucial if you want to make affecting music, and what more is a band conceptually than a group of people amalgamating their respective libraries to manufacture a sum of their parts? One cog in a four-piece taste-machine can be the thing that turns the possibility of exploration into just sticking with the familiar, which is what seems to be the case with Again, and, to a further extent, their recent performance at Baby’s All Right. 

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I stepped out for a smoke after the show, wading in cold blue light through a crowd of preppy 20-somethings who were trashed beyond belief. To my surprise, Dust’s frontman was outside in the smoking section, engaged in a monotone conversation with someone who looked just like him as well as another, quieter colleague, who looked more like a Xerox of the other two smushed together. I stood quietly and listened. A short, curly-haired woman and her partner joined the enclosure, a cigarette and a joint in their respective hands. 

In the middle of a sentence, the curly-haired woman tapped the frontman’s shoulder with a spirited hop onto her tip-toes; “Thanks for putting us on the list for this show back in Treefort!” Her enthusiasm was met with an, “Oh, um…you’re welcome? I think I remember you.” He immediately turned back to his Xeroxed colleagues. The woman sporadically butted into the conversation awkwardly while her partner stood next to her, silent, still and outwardly stoned. She was eventually granted unspoken permission to be tangent to this unremarkable chat, one that included the Dust frontman’s recounting of “opening for Built to Spill…but I didn’t even know any of the songs, anyway, so, yeah,” or something along those lines. All met with overblown laughs.

The frontman headed for the door, and before he could take three steps, the woman timidly asked for a picture and to join him inside so she could meet the Lip Bombs. He obliged, almost without saying anything at all. For once in my life, I wish I could’ve been the one to take that photo—I might not have an preeminent eye for portraiture, but I, similarly to Everett at her best, take pride in my ability to call out bullshit when I see it.