Ever since The Flaming Lips completed the album cycle supporting At War With The Mystics in 2006, the band has seemed intent on moving away from every conventional music structure which might imply a sense of warmth and get as far outside of common pop conventions as possible. The first step came just a few months after Mystics' release, when Wayne Coyne compiled the 20 Years Of Weird album and started blurring all of the lines which could have contained different musical periods within the band's work between 1986 and 2006. After Coyne had skewed reality a bit with that release, both singer and band discovered the joys of composing scores for their Christmas On Mars film (which really did sound about as cold as the vacuum of space) which the band then tried to turn into a standalone rock idea on Embryonic with questionable success. In spite of how weary of the band's spacey experiments listeners seemed to be getting, Coyne and The Flaming Lips got even more ambitious and, with the help of a few friends (including Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, Henry Rollins, Peaches, Ke$ha, Bon Iver, Yoko and Nick Cave), covered Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety and composed the stoner rock happening Heady Fwends.
Many fans were thrilled by all of those wild, weird and (in listening) incredibly chilly turns that the Flaming Lips had taken but, after so many years of what were really just self-indulgent excuses to see what wild idea they could pull off next, even diehard fans had begun to wonder when they'd hear a new Flaming Lips album which was born on solid ground – not a document assembled by committee in the cold vacuum of space.
To be perfectly honest, The Terror does not mark a spontaneous return to warmer, more terrestrial sonic climes for The Flaming Lips. The record is still pretty “out there” – but no one who hers it will be able to deny that it is the all-important first step back for the Flaming Lips as they make their way back in out of the cold.
All of the sci-fi dabbling that The Flaming Lips have been indulging in over the last few years helps to fade The Terror In at the top of “Look… The Sun Is Rising” but, even in that, listeners will be able to note a clear difference between where The Terror is and where everything The Flaming Lips have done over the last ten years was operating. The sounds are still distant, sparse, ethereal and soaked in reverb and echo, but none of them are dissonant at all; there is no longing about the gang vocal which characterizes “The Sun Is Rising” and, after it really gets going, the wall of synthesizers supplied by Steven Drozd doesn't eave a whole lot of room for space either – it's simply an unusual but compelling expanse. It should be pointed out that this beginning is not pop or rock on the same level that anything on Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots or At War With The Mystics operated on, but no listener will deny that there is something about “Look… The Sun Is Rising” which seems to be reaching a great distance toward that. That reach becomes increasingly clear as songs like “You Lust,” “You Are Alone” and “Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die”; there's no question that each is a dark, moribund exercise and Coyne's cracked falsetto seems higher than ever which implies a desperation that everything may fall apart at any moment and just tank into some imagined abyss – but there is still the narrowest crack of light at the end of each which pulls listeners along and keeps them from getting lost in Coyne's darkness.
After “Turning Violent” does exactly what its title promises, The Flaming Lips reach a sort of unified conclusion in the gang vocal of “Always There, In Our Hearts.” There, Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd and Kliph Scurloch begin by solemnly offer a sort of heartwarming sentiment (how else would one characterize a verse like “Always there… in our hearts, fear of violence and of death/ Always there in our hearts, there is none and there is fame/ Always there in our hearts, there is evil that wants out/ Always there in our hearts, there are sorrows and sadness/ Always there in our hearts, there never moving, standing/ Always there in our hearts, there's something good that we can't control”?) which may not have seemed so poignant if the band hadn't spent the last few years eradicating all unique personality from its music, but it ends up radiating with a brightness and hope in spite of itself and feels like it's trying to tell fans that The Flaming Lips will be back – and soon. While The Terror may set the precedent for being the darkest possible point in the band's catalogue, listeners will feel a bit of warmth and hope at the end of it; in its end, “Always There, In Our Hearts” (and The Terror – by extension) feels like the event horizon of a bright, brand new day for The Flaming Lips, and it will (once again) have fans waiting anxiously to see what comes next.
Artist:
www.flaminglips.com/
www.myspace.com/flaminglips
www.facebook.com/flaminglips
www.twitter.com/theflaminglips
www.twitter.com/waynecoyne
Download:
The Flaming Lips – The Terror (Deluxe Edition, Disc Two) – "The Sun Blows Up Today" – [mp3]
Further Reading:
Ground Control – Flaming Lips Discography (part 1) – [Review]
Ground Control – Flaming Lips Discography (part 2) – [Review]
Ground Control – Flaming Lips Discography (part 3) – [Review]
Album:
The Terror is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
Those long-familiar with The Flaming Lips can (and will – at length) happily admonish the uninitiated masses with tales of the band's ongoing quest to integrate space rock seamlessly into the pop idiom but, at this point in their career, while the band has been wildly successful on a cult level, they've only occasionally brushed the outer-most quadrants of pop super-stardom on the most superficial (and some would say ironic) of levels; even as their sound has gotten progressively larger, more bombastic and broad – sweeping, invading the truly genuinely populous medium of popular music (as in, everyone knows your name and bodyguards need to be hired to ward off and deter stalkers) has proven to be a daunting chore.
So after ten years of attempting to infiltrate the mainstream, The Flaming Lips have flipped the entire endeavor on its head with Embryonic; while each album since The Soft Bulletin has worn a shiny candy coating on its outside to make it slide down easy with listeners, this time the pop ideas are in the basic structures of the material. Noticeably, the eighteen songs on Embryonic are shorter (regularly less than four minutes in duration) and the lyric sheets are generally more sweet in keeping with pop orthodoxy, but they're also more sparsely instrumented – to the point that they almost sound hollow between thin containing walls of dissonance. It's a decidedly significant change of pace from the dense and lush expanses of albums like At War With The Mystics, Zaireeka (which took four discs to contain all the sound) and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Because the music is presented so consistently in this way from the jarring, sonorous guitar blast that opens “Convinced Of The Hex,” every fans' interest and curiosity will be piqued from the very beginning and they'll happily rush into this new narrative world.
What they find once they get inside will definitely surprise them. Eerily unadorned and with hypnotic rhythms and synthetic textures playing the central roles, the tension is palpable in Embryonic and a sense of melancholy dominates songs like “The Sparros Looks Up At The Machine,” “See The Leaves,” “Powerless” and “Worm Mountain” in spite of an obvious trip hop influence and casts an incredibly insular pall over the entire proceedings. On the surface, it feels uncharacteristically bleak for The Flaming Lips – a band that has always played a smiles card (whether chemically induced or not) for their fans – and those initially taken aback by the difference find themselves hunting feverishly through the album to find that grinning moment that just isn't there.
That sounds like it's supposed to be a critical slight and certainly new prospective fans will be scratching their heads in wonder at what all the fuss about The Flaming Lips could be about, but long-time fans will relish in this new perspective on the band's sound; as the dim introspection of “Worm Mountain” parts halfway through its runrime and suddenly brightens for a moment, the warmth conveyed is exquisite in its serene delivery and will win hearts with the emotional contrast contained in just one song. That moment fans the flames of curiosity and, on the second pass through the album, it's revealed that similar contrasts are used throughout the record to help propel the songs forward. Once listeners clue in to that fact and apply that principle to everything they hear, Embryonic proves to be breathtaking in its delicacy – even if it's unclear where this trail the band is following will lead listeners next.
Such is part of the appeal with The Flaming Lips though isn't it? Watching mastermind Wayne Coyne pull something extravagant and luxurious from out of the ether? Embryonic is a defining moment in that practice and (once again) leaves all possibilities wide open in the end.
Artist:
www.flaminglips.com/
www.myspace.com/flaminglips
Further Reading:
Flaming Lips "secret" show review – October 16, 2009
Album:
Embryonic is out now. Buy it on Amazon .
