Wayne

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots 20th Anniversary 5LP Super Deluxe Edition Box Set by The Flaming Lips. While The Flaming Lips had already established themselves in the pop and rock communities by the time Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was released in 2002, the album holds the distinction of being the one that really took the band to another level – and equally impressive was the manner in which they managed...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Hypnotist 12” EP by The Flaming Lips. 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and, to celebrate, Warner Brothers has embarked on an impressive campaign to re-examine the album (stay tuned for more on that later) but, without question, one of the most unusual parts of that endeavor is exhibited in the standalone release of The Hypnotist – a sort of unusually paced creation (one mammoth, 23-minute...

The Flaming Lips American Head (Warner Brothers) From the moment they have the opportunity to hear American Head, there’s no doubt that Flaming Lips fans will rejoice at the band’s return, for several different reasons. Some fans will just be happy the band is back with new music. Other fans will be thrilled that, for for the first time in over a decade, the Flaming Lips have returned to a more rockist permutation of their sound (last time was on...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Flaming Lips’ Greatest Hits Volume 1 LP. As a general rule, I must confess that Best-Of compilations seldom thrill me. While the odd set does prove to be the rule’s exception (like Nirvana’s black album, the set that Morphine released several years ago, ChangesoneBowie, Hot Rocks and All For Nothing/Nothing For All turned out to all be great sets) and which does present the band in question at its best, most...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Oczy Mlody LP by The Flaming Lips. It has been pretty evident that The Flaming Lips were in need of a change over the last few releases, the band just wasn’t sure what needed to happen in that capacity and so elected to throw everything at the wall to see what might stick. They tried getting darker and more dissonant on The Terror, but that didn’t work out so well because...

Wayne Federman The Chronicles of Federman (A Special Thing Records) As a comedy fan, I’ve heard the name Wayne Federman thrown around for a while. I really had no idea that it was because the man is a bit of an institution in the alt-comedy world and has been doing comedy for almost three decades. With such a long career, it’s no wonder the man’s comedy is being collected in the form of a chronicle a.k.a. The Chronicles of Federman....

The Flaming Lips Heady Nuggs 1994-1997 – 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic (Warner Brothers Records) As most fans know, The Flaming Lips had already gone through a few semi-seamless transitions by the time they were ready to begin making Clouds Taste Metallic. By then, they’d already been DIY Okie punks and goth-y pseudo rockers, and had even managed to sort of put together an arresting estimation of their first genuinely golden sound (see Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, released...