Last Tuesday, Heart of Noise travelled across the Atlantic to New York and caught the Black Lips at the Brooklyn Bowl. The bowling alley-come-music venue is in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, home to the hippest of New York hipsters -  on the Tuesday afternoon before the gig, in a Bedford Avenue café, there’s a guy working on his screenplay next to me, another twenty-something working on his band’s latest tracks on his laptop and a girl making some sketches from photos spread out on the coffee table. As you do if you’re a Williamsburger.

The cultural scene that has sprung up around the area has also spread to the music and I’m told by one of the locals that the first support band is a typical ‘Williamsburg’ band. I really liked the woozy electric-rock, irregular rhythms and washes of sound of New House. But apparently “loads of Brooklyn bands sound like that” and it doesn’t take much.

Maybe it’s frustration with this kind of music that made the crowd go crazy for the Black Lips - the band hail from Atlanta, Georgia and are just as much hillbilly blues as they are punk rock. Or maybe it was their reputation for reckless, hedonistic performances had something to do with it. But within the first 15 minutes, fans were crowd-surfing, throwing pitchers of beer over each other (and me) and happily moshing away at the front.

The gold-toothed, baseball cap wearing four-piece were surprisingly charming, doing shout-outs to fans from North Carolina and Atlanta, and were visibly feeding off the crowd’s energy. Compared to previous shows where they’ve been known to projectile vomit, urinate over each other and have no fear of stripping off, this might be considered tame. But there was some very rock ‘n roll, man on man kissing going on between singer Cole Alexander and Ian St Pe, and Cole was all over the stage trying on wigs and stripping off. During Bad Kids, their hit single soundtrack to 300 Days, they invited ‘Mr Dick’ to roller-blade his way across the stage – an elderly gent with long grey hair and a beard who was honking a horn shaking his tambourine.

As well as Drugs and some of the other hits from 200 Million Thousand, they played a lot of their short and punchy tracks from Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo. The garage punk energy was so infectious that it was hard to tell whether the music was a soundtrack to what was going on in the moshpit and on stage, or if the craziness was a result of the music.

Despite looking like they were off their faces playing with no holes barred, their deep-south American blend of garage punk still came across really well. And this is exactly how these beer-fuelled, sweat-soaked songs should be.

If you want to read an interview with the band and some great pics of the night, check out Brooklyn Vegan blog.