Flaming Lips

DISCOGRAPHY

Flaming Lips (EP, 1984) 7/10

Hear It Is (1985) 7/10

Oh My Gawd!!! (1986) 6.5/10

Telepathic Surgery (CD version, 1988) 7/10 +

In a Priest-Driven Ambulance (1990) 7/10

Hit To Death In the Future Head (1992) 7/10

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (1993) 6/10

Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) 6/10

Zaireeka (1997) 6/10

Soft Bulletin (1999) 6.5/10

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) 6.5/10 +

At War with the Mystics (2006) 5/10

Christmas On Mars (soundtrack, 2008) 5.5/10

Embryonic (2009) 6/10

w/ Stardeath & White Dwarfs: Doing the Dark Side of the Moon (covers, 2009) 5/10

7 Skies H3 (50-min version, 2011) 5/10

And Heady Fwends (2012) 4.5/10

The Terror (2013) 6.5/10

With a Little Help from My Fwends (covers, 2014) 3/10

Oczy Mlody (2016) 4/10

King's Mouth (2019) 4/10

American Head (2020) 5/10

   To be completely honest with myself, I never would have gotten into the Flaming Lips had their album packaging not been so colorful and interesting to look at. 

   Before I even listened to them, my general consensus was that they were another lousy hipster-band whose music made no sense until you smoked weed. This was partly true in all the right ways. 

   First: they were "another lousy hipster-band". Well, yes, because at the time my perception of "good music" was the stuff on the radio. By this definition, "bad music" was under-produced and obscure. This perspective has obviously changed. Also, "lousy" isn't completely inaccurate, as I doubt a member of the group's history was talented in terms of technicality — they just played what they liked to hear, not what was impressive to orchestral conductors. 

   Second: their music "made no sense until you smoked weed." Note that being high in order to understand something generalizes what a lot of normie-listeners dub "psychedelic" music. Thing is, even if you were stoned and the Lips' music still left you baffled, I like that in a band, too. Incomprehension is a challenge. If any work of art overwhelms you with stimulation, then the rewards are great once you learn how to relax and recognize all that stimuli in an affectionate way.

   There is some unpretentious fun available to every audience of the Flaming Lips. Their early "punk" records cater to raw and disorienting rock like early Pink Floyd and the Butthole Surfers, their later stuff dictated by Wayne Coyne's more conventional and melodic singing appealed to those who like art-pop or "weird indie bands", and then their albums onward — when they weren't making a new and baroque form of ambient pop — were the epitome of modern "experimental" music: the piecemeal release of Zaireeka, the coupled soundtrack/film release Christmas On Mars, and the batshit insane distribution of the 24-hour 7 Skies H3. (I'll let you look it up.) 

   Aside from the violence and vulgarity, the music of the Flaming Lips have consistently brought me a fantastical playhouse of strong and bizarre sounds — much in the same power of their visual art. 

   Hear It Is

   Oh My Gawd

   Telepathic Surgery resurrects Jimi Hendrix's acid-psychedelia in a white-trash trailer park. 

   The Hendrix-comparison may sound like blasphemy, but the similarities are on-point: there's the wah'd-out guitar licks; the soundscapes of heavy drums; studio gimmicks; an emphasis on a song's flow rather than a song's refrain; and outside of that, the record is as "trippy" as it is profound. 

   But perhaps what's most fascinating about the record is its sheer range in careless garage rock vs ethereal acid-psych worthy of Jimi Hendrix. The hixploitation psych-punk of the Butthole Surfers is front and center in tracks like Fryin Up, Hari-Krishna Stomp Wagon, or Drug Machine In Heaven, and then one song later there's a scathing thirty-second instrumental of a whacked-out guitar solo (Michael Time To Wake Up). Then the album moves on like nothing happened. What the fuck. 

   The album's unpredictability is its greatest attribute, and it's not an attribute to take lightly. After all, Rock music in general is meant to feel volatile.

   In a Priest-Driven Ambulance

   Hit To Death In the Future Head

   Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

   Clouds Taste Metallic

   Zaireeka

   Cinematographer Bradley Beesley (a friend and long-time fan of the band) recorded several hundred interviews and live performances of the Flaming Lips circa 1983-2004. These snippets would become The Fearless Freaks, a heartfelt film that functions as the ultimate exposition of the band's journey from crazy to crazier. 

   Wayne Coyne, as the most talkative of the group, hosts most of the footage. Although the film's "highlight" is less upbeat: this disturbingly vivid scene in which Steven Drozd discusses his heroin addiction in this shrugging, matter-of-fact fashion, while actually preparing to shoot up right there in front of the camera -- and when he finally injects, we see him tremble with his high in sickly mannerisms of excitement. We as the audience are subjected to his deteriorating health as if we were one of the other members of the band concerned for Steven's future. The impact is something that rockumentaries rarely achieve when discussing drug addiction: making it feel real and dangerous.

   Other than this, the many examinations of the band's different "sounds" and experiments over the years are fascinating. At a couple points Gibby Haynes is featured to describe the Lips in his own words (which were "like Neil Young with a case of gas") and he points out how desperately Coyne imitates the Butthole Surfers' musical style. I delighted in this being left in the film, because it meant that the Flaming Lips were not pretentious enough to propagandize themselves as "completely original" — it proves that they're honest enough to admit their roots and creative sources. (Which, ironically, makes the group more original than your average band of posers dubbing themselves as "entirely unique".)

   To promote the SpongeBob Squarepants Movie, the Flaming Lips recorded SpongeBob and Patrick Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy, a psych-pop ballad in the style of Yoshimi. Their association with the cartoon show further proves the band's childish leanings. 

   The concert DVD UFOs At the Zoo is the Flaming Lips' performance at Oklahoma City's public zoo. I enjoyed watching the band's theatrical antics (fireworks, smoke machines, sci-fi props, the big toy hands, Wayne in the giant hamster ball) but the documentary material wasn't as striking. (Intermittent footage of fans anticipating the show, the band and the roadies' preparation for the show, and Wayne touring the zoo to give some whimsical comments about animals.) 

   It runs a little long and, despite their antics, the band doesn't do quite enough visual trickery for me to feel the need to rewatch its entire two-hour length. In fact, the musical performance itself isn't very impressive either. Wayne can barely croak out his voice at certain points, and his unusually drunken demeanor (specifically when he got frustrated at the audience with Yoshimi, "All you fuckers in the back, sing the song!") slightly hurt the show's childish and whimsical tone. 

   I also hate how much time they spent on this rumor that they would let the animals out only to never let the animals out. Like, I knew it wasn't gonna happen when fans brought it up, but when Wayne himself addressed it to the crowd, that actually gave me hope. But no. "The music's over, bye!" I wanted to see y'all ride giraffes dude, come on. 

   After seven years of filming, Christmas On Mars would be released along with its original score in 2008. Written and directed by Wayne Coyne (with some help from Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury) the movie is a lot like his music: ambitiously cryptic, childish, and surreal. There is a lot of bad acting and lame dialogue, but the sets and visuals are amazing in consideration of the fact that it was made in Coyne's backyard. Steven Drozd gives a convincing performance as a depressed and weary astronaut — but maybe part of this was due to his fatiguing heroin addiction at the time. Professional actors such as Fred Armisen and Adam Goldberg make cameos; the former as a coworker in the spaceship, and the latter as the ship's psychiatrist (though his scene turns out to be the absolute worst part of the film: a slow and unpleasant session of meanness from a shrink to his patient.) Easily the most delightful performance is the accidental hilarity of Mark Degraffenreid's role as the aggressive ship captain, who uses his inflection and body language with such palpable discomfort that you almost feel bad for him, like he was just this friendly guy who wanted to be in Coyne's film but didn't know he'd have to play a one-dimensional asshole. (The part where the space cadet informs him of the broken "air-renewal" thing for the ship cracks me up: "Well, what are we supposed to breathe then!?" *awkward silence* "Our own SHIT!?")

   Their music aside, the Flaming Lips have always been reliably psychedelic even in terms of imagery — one look at their album covers and packaging confirms that — so, expectedly, the film does provide several colorful smorgasbords of visual effects and optical illusions. 

   The soundtrack, meanwhile, is also a piece of light success: the fluctuations of psychedelic noise and space ambiance echo early electronic music, a great contrast to the band's library of pop songs like Do You Realize. Even if one doesn't watch the movie, the album Christmas On Mars is daring and creative on its own.

   In late December of 2009, Wayne would promote his nephew Dennis Coyne's band Stardeath & White Dwarfs with a collaboration album, in which the two bands would depict a noise-rock rendition of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The album would also boast the presence of punk legend Henry Rollins to perform spoken-word bits and the electroclash female singer Peaches to sing the gospel vocals on Breathe and Great Gig in the Sky. 

   To the album's credit, hearing an interpretation of the over-produced and commercial Pink Floyd LP put to rawer garage-rock arrangements is refreshing, but the original Dark Side is clearly the superior listening experience, as a lot of the decisions in this cover-album simply wouldn't stand well on its own without the original material to contrast it with. The original compositions were meant for relatively slow-paced and mellow performances, not garish studio gimmicks set to abrasive grooves at every second. Where the original Dark Side showed sophistication and grace, this shows sloppy guitar-fuzz and noisy neo-psychedelic effects. 

   I appreciate how the two Coyne groups dared to portray what is considered such a "classic" album in such an unexpected fashion, but the results are hit-or-miss no matter what the original album sounded like. Their rendition of Great Gig in the Sky would have been great if it didn't turn into another anticlimactic groove set to Peaches' yodeling. Their instrumental of On The Run is as good as the album gets, as it ends with half a minute of psychedelic effects that manage to stay engaging rather than obnoxious. 

   More than anything else though, I'm frustrated at their disposal of Henry Rollins for mere spoken-word. True, the man is an acclaimed comedian and public speaker, but I fail to understand why they would cast one of the most intense shouters in the recorded history of Rock music to do nothing but bits for ambiance. (Perhaps I wouldn't be so upset if his name wasn't advertised on the cover — which initially excited me to imagine that the band altered Dark Side severely enough to make Henry's vocals fit but, no... He's just the guy reading out shit in the background sometimes. Whatever.)

   The Terror is the band at their most sinister while maintaining their sense of ecstasy and romance.

   Each of the nine tracks boast childish melodies as well as anxious soundscapes of metallic synth.

   Perhaps the highlight of the album is The Terror for its intensely noisy refrain — a keyboard's voice scorched with distortion into the sound of a wheezing megarobot. 

   While the Flaming Lips' cover album of Pink Floyd's Dark Side was gaudy and explosive in places that were probably inappropriate for Roger Waters' mellow composition, the band's renditions of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper held no restraint and censored none of the musical input from the "fwends" distorting the music into some tasteless batch of neo-psychedelic effects and rave beats.

   Right from the start we get a volcanic solo from Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis that ravages all hope of the record being faithful to the original album's Pop-rock sophistication. Even the legendary A Day in the Life is executed poorly with its jettison of the orgasmic hook of climbing orchestras and brass instruments in favor of more fucking techno-beats and cheesy reverb.

   And yet I wonder if the sound of this album — with the compounded talents of all the musicians brought in — would have yielded a better record of original music instead of these terrible imitations of a band that never intended their work to be in the style of any of these artists. 

ROCKUMENTARIES

Bradley Beesley: Fearless Freaks (2005): 6.5/10

Wayne Coyne, Bradley Beesley & George Salisbury: Christmas On Mars (2008) 5.5/10 

EXTERNAL LINKS