The Flaming Lips, more than any other, are my band, a group of dudes I seriously took to my heart and rooted on to, what seems like now to be the very top of cool, a computer ad on TV featuring Wayne Coyne in a white suit and a bunch of people in bunny outfits hopping around behind him. But it wasn't always such beans and grease for the Lips, oh no no no. They spent many long years laboring in the idiotic local 'bar scene' of Norman, Oklahoma, where everyone shuts up for SportsCenter and going so far as to order a Heineken is liable to get you thrown off the top of the athletic dorm. Yeah, this rotating cast of potheads, with singer/twanger Coyne as frontman and bassist/straightman Michael Ivins as the only two mainstays, are native Oklahoma Citians, odd as it may be to some. Still live there, actually, just a hop away from Rainbow Records off 23rd and Classen Rd., last time I checked (their house is the one with all the Santas and Christmas lights on it in August). They still do all their experiments in OKC first, then go to London and New York to all the stuffy art-fartys. We got the neato legendary Christmas concerts every year. We got bandmembers coming to the bowling alley off Penn Ave. to check out local talent play 'Rock 'n' Bowl Friday Nights'. Shit, we even got to see the old dry cleaners up on Main St. in Norman in the 'She Don't Use Jelly' video aeons ago. And, yeah, I even had my 'close encounter' with Wayne and Michael at a Stereolab show at Trees in Dallas one time, when they came up and said hi to my friend Terry, who knew them pretty well. Even got drunk with them over Lips-bought lobsters. Me? I got an autograph once.

Anyway, enough of my misty-eyed nostalgia about the ol' times when I used to go to college and smoke lots of weed and make out with easy chicks (not necessarily in that order), the Lips nowadays are no longer quite so accessible, what with all their NME covers and world-travelling and shit. But if you can take the Lip out of Oklahoma, you can't take the Oklahoma out of the Lip. They are very weird, to almost a point of sheer silliness, but their weirdness is never disgusting (like their Texan counterparts, the Butthole Surfers), pointlessly academic (Polvo, Thinking Fellers Union Local...), or dull and sedated (shoegazer rock). Their brand of weirdness is sorta kind-hearted, sorta Popular Electronics (but never cold...actually make that 'sorta Radio Shack'), sorta hicky, and they generally come across like your best grand stoned-out theories actually come to fruition rather than being swept aside by a sudden and incalculable urge for Taco Bueno at 1:30 AM. This was a band that would play covers of Led Zeppelin's 'Thank You' and frigging 'Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd as recently as the early 90's, fer chrissakes. Albeit covered in all sorts of feedback and noise the worst Nuggets garage goons would go gaga for. And they did it because they liked it, not to be 'ironic' or anything as distastefully 90's like that. Nah, these boys were children of the late-70's, and they actually loved classic rock. Not so much nowadays, when their touchstones seem to be European electronic music and old 60's pop like Burt Bacharach used to write. But get me, this band has launched some strange fucking ideas. How about stalking label execs to get signed to a major (yes, they wanted to sell out and get lots of money. And then spend it on obscure film equipment and giant panels of Christmas lights. They live in a fucking split level in a dodgy neighborhood or Oklahoma City, dammit, don't you understand yet? These guys are not Sonic Youth.) What else would you dub having their first major hit be a novelty song about wiping your nose with magazines and covering your toast with Vaseline? Or releasing a CD-length album on four separate CDs which need to be played in synch with each other to sound properly, thus supposedly blowing your mind and most of the minds in your local school district? Or say, handing out headphones at your concerts which feed different music than what comes out of the PA? Or boombox orchestras? Or showing film of your drummer playing behind your band in concert while the same person plays keyboards live on stage? I mean, how much cough syrup does this band consume, anyhow?

I guess what strikes me most about this band is how conventional they are despite all of their 3 1/2-sided packaging. Their first albums sound like nothing more than noisier and less sensitive Replacements, and even their noisiest distortion period is just moderately rabble-rousing. Their riffs are usually fairly solid, and even the most thick-headed .38 Special fan in the 'Barry Switzer Is God' t-shirt would at least think this band rocks pretty good. Or did, anyway, because Wayne has gotten bit by the big ol' bug known as Adulthood, and though his ideas are no less loopy (even worse, to be truthful), his chosen means of delivery has eschewed noise and loudness for layered madness, a little bit of straightjacket in each channel, if you know what I mean. And as long as his song descriptions start out like 'Well, we wanted to make this song about death and how all of us are going to someday leave our love ones' and end up like 'and that's when the dog started chewing exclusively on the big plastic bug toy from that day forward', we know that the spirit of the band is going to live on. They've already outlasted the cutthroat and ultra-cool-fascist alternative trenches of the late 80's, their short stint as a Buzz Bin artist, being 'the weird band with the four-CD album', to being the Next Cool Thing and beyond. And it's all been sorta amateurish, sorta dorky, a little too druggy, and endlessly interesting. God bless the Flaming Lips.

Hear It Is - Restless 1986

Not an extremely fandango way to start the ol' career off, but what the hell, at least they weren't doing Goth like they had been. Nah, this is like I said above, loopier Replacements with fewer fart jokes and 'mature' songs about arty-farty friends and more songs about Godzilla and drugs. One this that's for sure is that if you come back from the noisy likes of Priest Driven Ambulance, you'll see what happens without all the noise and drama....you get fast garage rock. If you look back from Transmissions From The Satellite Heart you'll see that we've already got a pretty good handle on the concept of the hook as applied to a pop song (instead of, you know, like your eyeball or something), and if you've only heard Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi, you're going to just say 'Wha?'. I mean, this music is not made by professionals...they 'try' lots of things, no doubt in an attempt to be original, but more likely because they had no idea how to do it the right way in the first place. Take the 'deconstruction' in 'Staring At Sound With You (Reprise)'...is that a real attempt to shake up conventional song-structure, or just an attempt to shake off studio boredom by fucking around?

Eh, I'm giving it a B for listenability, not for their attempts at provocation like 'Jesus Shooting Heroin', which contains the toxin-influenced line 'I never really understood religion, except it seems a good reason to kill'...like right on man. I mean, if we could get everyone in the world just to sit around the lava lamp and take a few hits off the Starship Bong-prize here, I just know the world wouldn't be so damned violent and uptight about things like ages of consent and stuff....yeah man....I think I've decided to become a vegetarian and start snorting scag, whaddya think?

...anyway. Or their absolutely, painfully unoriginal idea of covering 'Summertime Blues' just like every other band ever in the existence of carbon-based lifeforms in the presence of sound-waves carried through the atmosphere in a harmonious fashion. Has any band ever not played this song? I mean, besides Orchestral Manoeuvers In My Anus? And while I'm at it, why does Wayne insist on totally singing the word 'Godzilla' in the most irritating possible way, while still managing to use his regular voice? Argh.....but then again, without these little bits and pieces of bone fragment to have to pick out of your Lip Sandwich, you'd never actually get the complete experience, would you? Their irritations and fuck-ups are lovable parts of the package.

When am I actually going to start decribing the listenability of Hear It Is, anyway? Sometime soon, I hope? Well, 'With You' is a good start, a nice combination of loud-soft, without ever losing its sing-song simplicity and creeping catchiness. Some would call it underdeveloped and juvenile, I call it a pretty good rock song. Call me nuts, but the way the band falls in underneath 'when I'm WITH YOU....when I'm WITH YOU....WHEN I'M.....' and then drops back down to sweet major chords again is a little bit of a rush for me, kinda like how you always know the 12-bar turnaround is always gonna come around like clockwork, but it still affects you that little tiny bit. And I like the brave idiocy of 'Trains, Brains, and Rain', which manages to be a fine little pop song that happens to poke fun at pop song cliches and bad rhyming while still being guilty of both. But does that song steal its ending from a Boston song, or what? Someone back me up here....or don't. Whatever. And the aforementioned (beforementioned? thing I wrote about above?) 'Jesus Shooting Heroin' is alternately harrowing, sadly stupid, and funny. The screaming and the line 'today, a needle's under my skin...Jesus shooting her-o-in-nn' is scary, most of the rest of the lyrics are dumb, and the quotes from other songs are just funny as hell once you get what they are....took me by surprise, eh? 'Just Like Before' and 'Unplugged' lean towards the punky side of fast and simple, but 'She Is Dead' sounds like a Frisco-psychedelic climax to some 1968 freak-out album...the peak of the trip, the Lost Chord Found, if you read me. 'Charlie Manson Blues' is obviously an attempt to recreate Sonic Youth's 'Death Valley '69' by having Nick Cave front the Archies with John Bonham on drums, but fun nonetheless...I mean, I like this sort of music, I like the way Wayne makes such a strong effort to make his uncool Neil Young voice sound scary and rough, I like the bad reverb....it's all very 'good effort, guys', and I never hate listening to it. It's just, you know, kinda dumb and sloppy. Like your first kiss.

Capn's Final Word: Make them tell fart jokes and do Kiss covers and attend a New Yawk gallery opening on 'shrooms and you have most of the songs on Let It Be, and everyone fellates that album to death. Just dumb stoned kids making noisy, catchy pop noises over Led Zeppelin's own rhythm section.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Oh My Gawd...The Flaming Lips - Restless 1987

Th' Flamin' Li's put both tentacles forward and declare their oddness on Oh My Gawd, from the Iron Maiden/Deadhead/New Age blender mixture on the album cover to the, well, to the songs. I guess that's mostly what you end up getting when you plunk down your hard-earned nosh for a record album these days. Unless you're getting video clips and stuff, and I stopped caring about that after I spent 3 hours trying to get the 'enhanced features' on Wu Tang Forever to work, just to find out they were a bunch of snapshots and ads for Wu Wear. Nah...the only 'enhancement' you're gonna get is to melt down the vinyl and inject it into your soft tissue, which I hear will make you figure out that the album cover is actually minimalism at its very best. (No, really, I think one of the band members did this cover himself. Probably Ivins, the creep.)

Oh My Gosh continues in the 'Placemats'-sounding vein, but the Lips fumble ever onward to their chosen sound and manage to put their stamp on things a little more than on the debut. Or at least do things the way they feel like doing them....AMG calls 'One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond On A Sunday Morning' an Ummagumma wannabe, but when exactly on Ummagumma did Pink Floyd do anything this way-out frogdance trip-nasty? What, on 'Granchester Meadows'? Maybe, maybe on Saucerful of Secrets...but this is simply trippy riffing done very well....crash into the 'ATOM BAWMMMMM!!!!!', build slowly, release, build slowly, scream....oh yeah, baby. A pretty little piano figure insinuates itself like that freshman girl you liked when you were a senior. You knew she was a little young and, anyway, you had a girlfriend, but you sure like the way that thing tinkled on your 'Sunday Afternoon' and made you feel like you were a bad, bad boy. Or not. Whatever. Pink Floyd or not Pink Floyd, the song about Evel Kinevel sounds like Pink Floyd again, but this time it's Syd Barrett's group of foppy cracked actors rather than the cool, calm, and egotistical later band. The Flaming Lips try everything besides laying down a groove and playing riffs over it, and it may strike you as prog or it may strike you as porn, but whatever happens, it'll strike you in some way, shape or form. These guys were into drugs, and not into the drugs as in 'let's get fucked up and get some chicks' or 'lets feel like we are the Right Hand Man of God', but in a way that lets you open up brand new wings in the Institutional Facility of your Psyche and Let The Patients Run Things For Awhile. Song titles like 'Ceiling's Bending' and waterslides down Coyne's neural pathways like the 'Ode To C.C.' duo prove everything beyond any shadow of doubt, take my word. Hell's got all the good bands, anyway. Right on, brother.

I'd say I like that weird stuff the best, but I'd be a-lyin' like Alyssa Milano in a producer's office. I really like the more normal songs, like the bad bastard opener 'Everything's Exploding', which is my vote for best Lips song prior to Ambulance. And speaking of the devil, this album is sort of a mini-Priest Driven Ambulance of it's own, except with less intentional noise mongering and, you know, the songs aren't quite as good. But if you've heard 'Five Stop Mother Superior Rain' and were strangely moved by basic chord structures and meaningless lyrics sung in as an affecting way as possible, 'Can't Exist' is just more oil for the wok, you see. Even if it reminds me of Phish when they try not to be so damned obnoxious. And 'Thanks To You' may be the only attempt someone has ever made to remake Led Zeppelin's 'Thank You', ever. And damn near blow the original clear over the Misty Mountains. Mnyah, but things get let down when the number of ideas coarsing through the skulls of the avatars begin to outstrip their ability to project them. 'Prescription: Love' is a rambling trip to the editing floor that got sidetracked...if only they'd worked a little more on it. The sung part is pretty rad, but that intro....horrrea. And many songs have similar poxes on their visages, a badly constructed chord change, a lame guitar solo, a line or two that encourages cringes. And Jesus Christ, 'Love Yer Brain' sounds like a broken down Neil Diamond pleading with the nurse at the methadone clinic for another 25cc's. Ergh....what we need is a little more thought before setting pen to paper, or pick to string, or paper to tongue. The album, yeah, I love the crap out of it, and they yet again prove to me that their pop sense is a strong as anything on the Top 40, they just prefer to act in a manner that gets them in shows opening for the Butthole Surfers rather than performing on American Spazstand. Not that there's anything wrong with that....just that the Lips could write rings around darn near all of their ZZ Top-obsessed late-80's alt-rock friends but prefer to dress it up in 'don't worry, I'm not actually capable of remembering I wrote this excellent song around a basic chord change and my nice Neil Young/Paul Westerberg voice because I inhale psychedelics faster than the Chicago Bears inhale steroids'.

Capn's Final Word: The problem with doing drug-influenced music is not that your audience may not be able to understand what your trying to do, it's that you may find that you're not actually be able to do what you intend to because you've grown giant Snicker's bar instead of fingers.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Telepathic Surgery - Restless 1988.

Hrmnm. I used to seriously think this album was mediocre, and since I only have it on vinyl (heh heh) I haven't been able to give it as many spins at all as the other Laming Flips albums around it. Now, after getting off my duff (sheeeit, I work like 55 hours a week now and I have a little baby and a wife who wants me to take her out shopping every two days....my duff ain't getting much use, I'd say) and making a cassette copy of my LP, I've finally been able to spend a few quality hours with Telepathetic Surgery on my morning walk to work (yeah, I walk to work now, just like I did in Russia...pretty fitting for an environmental engineer, huh?), I'd say that the album is like a 4-yard run play on 2nd and 8 - progress, to be sure, but certainly not the play that gets the cheerleaders discussing the underwear kegger that evening. A LOT of these songs sound just like counterparts on Gee Whillikers, like how the opening 'Drug Machine in Heaven' is a breakneck riff-rocking statement of purpose. Or maybe statement of lack of purpose...this is pretty much fast slacker grunge they're playing. It is 1988, about the year that this sort of unvarnished Marshall frosting became popular with the kids and their speech therapists. And though Nirvana probably hadn't actually played for any audience save the Melvins and maybe an Aberdeen bum or two yet, 'Right Now's intro is pure Bleach, and the slashing classical stridency on the verse is pure Who. What we don't have, particularly, is anything new. I don't hear too many new signposts on the road to nowhere, if you catch my cold, and I think you do. I happen to hear a harmonica solo, a pretty 3-line piano piece that sounds like it was lifted from a Journey ballad and stripped of all the other instruments, a song that sounds just like Neil Young, and Wayne attempting to not sound so much like the guy from the Replacements so much anymore. He's not yet Neil Young, either, so I'd say he's got his most obviously 'rock 'n' roll' voice installed on this record. And so does the band. They've been bitten by the rock 'n' rolls again, and no amount of noisy feedback intros that sound like a cover of Eddie Van Halen's 'Intruder' played by Bennie on L.A. Law ('Michael, Time to Wake Up') are going to change that. 'Chrome Plated Suicide' is the meaningful mid-tempo song for the album, the one where Wayne assigns a few extra brain cells to the movement of the writing pen rather than sacrificing them to particular oxidizing chemicals. I guess I'm touched, but at this (still) early point in the band's career, I'm not sure if I'm moved by the lyrics ('If you take away my pain, please don't leave my brain, 'cos then I think it hurts just the same') as much as the well-worn but reliable chord sequence. A chord sequence that would fit Tom Petty is there were less distortion on the guitar. Like that, you know.

Erm, not much else to say, I guess. I nominate 'Hari Krishna Stomp Wagon (Fuck Led Zeppelin)' as best song title on the record (closely followed by 'Redneck School of Technology') but oddly one of the few songs that doesn't sound much like it was influenced by the Balloons. Not unless they were playing goofy punk-pop songs about pyromania with Yes-influenced bridges on that there Horses of the Homely, anyway. And I don't think they were, last time I checked. Gosh, not like these song titles have much to do at all with the content of the songs. I mean, the second side is like some sort of a UFO concept thingamabobby that starts off with someone (most likely Wayne) relating a story about 5 mysterious flying saucers viewed twice as a youngster, and then moving on to songs that use the magic 'alien' word a few times. I'd say the music, though, is just more of the same 3 or 4 flavors we've heard on the first half, which is about 6 or 7 less than on the less album, but still pretty satisfying if you don't mind decent twiggy riff rockers played by a band that's pretty clearly having a great time.

Capn's Final Word: They get the editing and lose the spark, and edge close to generic grunge territory. But they're still damn solid, and all they really need is someone actually weirder than themselves to help out....

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

In A Priest Driven Ambulance - Restless 1990

Try as they might, the Lips just couldn't get it over the edge as a trio. There was just too much for Wayne Coyne to do, not enough strings to ring and not enough fingers to twiddle to get the noise that was in his mind out into the universe and (hopefully) down on tape. That was, you see, until he met up with kindred spirit Michael Donohue, a man who was struggling with his very own, similarly plaster-shattering rock band Mercury Rev. Well, ol Wayne convinced Johnny Guitar first to come be his tech, then to play second noisy guitar in the Lips, thus ringing in the First True Era of Flaming Lips Godhead. Imagine carnival music on a spaceship orbiting the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith, wherein the crew is battling a rebellious Hal with the added ammunition of a fully stocked stash of hallucinogens and candy bars. But, you know, Wayne's obsession isn't sci-fi or rampaging computers (PC's gone wild! See these Pentiums Bare Their Connection Pins At Spring Break!) it's Jesus, right there from the very beginning. And Wayne doesn't ruminate ala Joan Osbourne or Bono, about who God is and how He seems to be so cool, yet still ripe for a hip update now and then...nah. Coyne looks at God and Jesus almost like comic book heroes. God Walks Among Us Now! I'm Getting Lost In The Tide! Shine On Sweet Jesus On Me! This is a man who saw the face of the savior in a glass of STP and started obsessing about what would actually happen if He came back and was pissed at the world about how bad we are to each other. But the teardrops cover him while he is still asleep, and, in the end, Wayne and Jesus are friends, if Wayne still feels a little uneasy around the temporal master.

My wife: 'It's not Madonna'. How true.

But this album isn't really about Jesus and God and stuff as much as it is about making quake-inducing noise in all shapes and forms. They pitch-shift their voices, resulting in Alvin the Chipmunk duet with Andre the Giant on a chorus. They morph a pretty standard riff into a funkadelic feedback feast on 'Unconsciously Screaming', resulting in what I feel to be their best-ever pure rocker. They're able to cast off the shrouds of classic rock to the degree that allows them to retain the powerful riffing and always fantastic rhythm section work, yet paint all sorts of cream cheese over the top of the donut -- a veritable orgy for the alimentary canal. And the hit just keep on cumming, from the howling 'Screaming' to the radio-between-the-stations 'God Walks Among Us Now'. And you thought guitar duetting had to all sound like 'Free Bird'...scoff scoff. Little did you know that an entire song could be based around feedback being passed back and forth between two guitar players like a holiday fruitcake. 'Take Me Ta Mars' brings the funk. It rocks, yeah, it does. And if you thought the riff on LZ's 'Out On The Tiles' (from III) was too great to be saddled to such a lame song, it's recycled brilliantly on 'Mountainside', probably the most controlled the band gets on the more rockingest stuff on Priest.

My wife: 'It's not edible'. Well.....

The quieter songs are the real signposts of artistic growth. Taking 'A Million Billionth' to the nth degree are strangely moving pieces like 'Raining Babies', 'There You Are', and, most of all, on 'Five Stop Mother Superior Rain'...yeah, he kinda went back on not singing about rain, trains, and brains, but it's his present to the world and he wants you to have it. The slide guitar work on 'Five Stop' is enough to win a Grammy if the world were right, but Wayne's vocal delivery is really the stamp of approval. 'Someone please tell this machine I'm not a machine' is filled with emotion when sung in this new hick Neil Young voice he's come up with, and only he can make lines this confusing reach right into one's soul and pluck a few strings here and there. He namechecks Jesus, the Hate Generation, and John Lennon's brain, and the whole thing seems to sum up the viewpoint of a mid-80's heartland punk fanatic pretty well. You're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't. It's what makes the world go round, baby.

My wife: 'Why don't you write that I'm sitting in your lap in only my underwear, keeping you from writing?' And you wonder why I only update every few days....

Ah, there's some covers of the stripe Coyne likes (cheesy yet heartfelt...here it's 'What A Wonderful World', not rendered in it's best-ever version), and I'm not at all in love with 'Stand In Line', what seems to be an endless, underdeveloped attempt to do something completely different (just seems out of place, really), and the other outtake bonus songs aren't too hot, but if you cram a five-pack of superior rockers and three slower ones of the same quality, it's just got to be a solid A, doncha think? Right on, brother.

Capn's Final Word: Nothing else sounds quite like this in the Lips catalogue, and they never synthesized Loveless and Houses Of The Holy better anywhere else. An achievement.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Mike rokarolla@hotmail.com
Album Name: Unconciously Screaming E.P Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: My favoorite track ont his 4 song e.p is "Lucifer Rising" which is an effects ladden guitar noise freak out based on a repative riff. I would like anyone who knows what the LYRICS to this are to please send them to me. okay, pretty please.

Mike Your Rating: A Any Short Comments?: Haven't heard this, or really all that much Lips, but just wanted to say I'm pretty sure the other guitarist's name is actually Jonathan Donahue, not Michael.

The Day Andy Gibb Died - Bootleg 199?

Buttleg bootleg, 37 minutes of which is from Norman, Oklahoma, December 1990 shows the noisy, screechy Lips in all their unlistenably recorded splendor. This is one Radio Shack boombox short of being silence, if you catch my drift. Let's see...on 'Lucifer Rising', I hear a flanger that may or may not actually be hooked up to a guitar. By the time of 'Unconsciously Screaming', a wah pedal has apparently decided to attack said flanger pedal, and the ensuing fight is what we get immortalized on the tape. Drums here and there, Wayne somewhere in the bathroom forgetting everything he ever knew about phrasing. I'm guessing all this maelstrom of cottage cheese and blackboard nails is being committed by Jonathan Donohue, because things improve immeasurably on the ballad 'Shine On Sweet Hey Zeus', other than the detuned fucking about that mars the opener Not like they pulled out their mandolins and steel guitars or anything (and Coyne's vocals are even worse on this song, believe it or not). The Dead Boys and Bee Gees' covers are similarly incomprehensible, but 'Ma, I Didn't Notice' and it's instrumental intro are at least like a flashlight in the forest...now we see what we're doing and where exactly that man-eating bear is, dammit. Since the Lips staunchly refuse, so far anyway, to release a real live album (they'd probably rather just broadcast all of their concerts on radio or something), this is the only little tidbit you get of live Lips, and though they don't sound ANYTHING like this anymore, it's still at least a vicarious way to see how exactly they get heads to explode when playing live.

The rarities stuff is a helluva hot dog easier to listen to (except for 'Thank You'/'Death Valley '69', on which you can actually hear the needle hit the vinyl bootleg record this was ripped from. What ever happened to honor amongst thieves, anyway?), but really it's just more of the same crap that's been released from their vaults in the past few years. Dumb covers ('Peace, Love and Understanding' is cool) that they play way too seriously...I mean 'Thank You' is even schlockier than the original, if that's possible. You get T-Rex, David Bowie, a Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett medley, and exactly two new songs, the haunting, Zombies-ish acoustic 'Jesus Is Floatin' (Jesus Song No. 8)' and 'Cold Day In Hell', which is pretty great for an Adam Sandler song, really. But unless you count Wayne Coyne in your will, hearing them play covers is probably not worth spending this much cash for.

Capn's Final Word: Why I don't usually buy bootlegs. I didn't even have all the studio albums when I plunked down all the cash I paid for this. Yeah, I'm a tard.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Hit To Death In The Future Head - Warner Bros. 1992

Grabbing melody by the ears and wrangling it all around the studio like a red-headed stepladder, Hit To Death is the album where the Lips find themselves at the crossroads between making aggressively beautiful noise and making provocatively beautiful noise. I see it as a modern-day Magical Mystery Tour, not willing to take itself too seriously ('Halloween On The Barbary Coast' fer chrissakes) as it forges these lovely trails of smoke through the skylines of our minds. Jonathan Donohue is gone to play with beach balls at Mercury Rev concerts, but his lessons are not lost...they're just replicated and overdubbed. Instead of one Wayne, like we had on the last trio-made album Telepathic Surgery, we've got three or four. One of them is riffing, one is soloing, one is doing something pretty, and one is frigging the whole thing up in a delightful manner. Even the traditional opening ballsy rocker is memorable more for it's pitch-shifted troll chanting than it's riff, that seems too fuzzed up to decipher anyway. And the fourth song, 'Felt Good To Burn', I remember for one line and one line only, 'I wasn't waving goodbye, I was saying hello'. Fit for Sesame Street? Possibly so, I'll admit, but as long as we're admitting, I'll admit the line (and the song) are moving and shadowy, and I'll admit I'd like another Canadian and Coke. I just watched The Untouchables with Robert DeNiro and Kevin Costner and they kept taliing about Canadian whiskey, and I just happened to have some Canadian Mist in my cabinet (the only liquor I have, actually, unless you count champagne and some Olympia beers I got 12 for $4.) so I got a nice bit hammered. And now this album sounds frigging revelatory....even the simple tunes (I wouldn't say many of them are complex, by any means) have a solid hook, some great bit of singing (in tune this time, unlike most of Priest...that criticism I'll concede about the record), a well-fitting orchestral part, some grand sweep...the Lips are preferring to soar rather than flail on Hit, and with Mr. Soul Neil Young himself on the vocals (not really), it's like the '67 Beatles meshed with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Brian Wilson came in to help with the arrangements. Probably the main beef in the meat counter is that none of the songs particularly strike me as being about anything in particular, and as such I notice lines, not the message Wayne's trying to send me....because there isn't any. They're gladly not afraid of their guitars, but now that they're major label brats like they are, they're simply a lot more careful about everything. No doubt they spent bunches of studio time and record company money on making this album as glitch-free as they could, and all the work shows. But just don't confuse it as slick...that it's not. There's simply too many cogs in the machinery for this engine to sound anything other than like the Joad wagon running on liquid crystal meth fed through a baby bottle directly into the supercharger. Hang onto them chicken fried steaks, Grampaw, for Californy is comin' soon. Yee-haw....

End the album before the last track, though. Trust me on that. If you forget and leave the album on while you step out, you might come back to find yourself evicted and your housepets donated to shelters. Please just stop the CD early.

Capn's Final Word: Still delightfully noisy, but in a friendly way...Wayne finds Jesus in a sunbeam and decides to write a concept album about feeling groovy.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Transmissions From The Satellite Heart - Warner Bros. 1993

Absolutely poptones. Probably the best rock album of 1993, though of course I haven't heard them all, but as I sit here in my enormous closet looking at all of my thousands of CD's and CD-Roms and LPs and cassettes and whatnot, I've most likely heard all of them at one time or another. I mean, Sponge can't hold a Candlebox to these guys, and for at least 5 minutes, we actually had the Flaming Lips on MTV, and not even on 120 minutes, either...that'd be cheating. The song that did the trick? Oh, only the most Dr. Demento-worthy track they ever did, a pure novelty about dying your hair with fruit juice that, as great bands often are, represents the Brand Identity of these guys to most people (or most people alive in 1994, anyway). How it beat out 'Turn It On' or 'Pilot Can At The Queer Of God' or, shit, any of these other songs on here is a testament to how goofy the Lips or radio programmers or MTV or the record-buying public or my Uncle Jim the NRA man or someone is.....Someone is to blame! For lots of idiot kids (though not the same number or idiot kids who bought The Verve Pipe) bought this record, and it apparently stuck to very few of them. But then let's remember that in 1993-4, the name of the game was grunge, and this album predates such Luddism with a really crystalline blend of Beatles, shoegazer rock, and nursery rhyme. And even more so than Hit to Death, the melodies here are vicously strong. Strong enough to make a line like 'And now...she's got helicopters....yes she has....' sound, well, if not profound, then at least as kind and pleasant as a morning shower with the naked, charming woman of your choice.

And why this album get the nod is just the density of ideas on display....these guys have abandoned the riff for a more composition-driven songwriting style based on passages and shifts, but (again, thanks be to Allah) they still remember that they're guitar players first. And while Transmissions is the first moment when lovers of the last few albums will begin to see connections with the current band, this is still enough of a rock band to encourage raucous headbanging as well as pensive consideration of what a pregnant head might look like. We've got Wayne and new members Ronald Jones and Steven Drozd taking some chances even beyond the whole abandonment of noise for noise sake...how do you think the hardcore noisecore fans would take to the acoustic country-folk 'Plastic Jesus'. Even the most noisy songs on the album leave room to breathe, and therefore make a much stronger impression than they would have just a few years before. I believe 'Superhumans' wouldn't have meant anything if it had been on, say, Oh My Gawd!, but here it's almost like a declaration of dependence for the newfangled Lips. Or you can just enjoy a perfect T-Rex of a good time like 'Be My Head' or the early 80's lovefest of 'When Yer Twenty-Two', which have no ulterior motives. This album is like listening to your favorite radio station play all of your favorite bands at the same time...sorta disjointed, but you still get to hear 30 years of great music all at once. The Lips have tried their hardest to replicate that here. Each song gets under the skin like a tattoo needle and makes you feel all tangerine all day long. What else could you want? A good day album from a band that's discovered their sunrise.

Capn's Final Word: Yeah, they still play 'Jelly' live...they gave everyone big bags of confetti at the show I went to, and such a simple idea was brilliant....you realise their skewed genius here on Transmissions.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Clouds Taste Metallic - Warner Bros. 1996

Sort of a sequel to Transmissions, but without the recognizable hit. Hey, I've got a story for you that was related to me by by good ol' college friend Terry who used to actually hang out with the Lips from time to time. Here he was, eating some expensive dinner (on the Warner Brothers tab) with Michael and Wayne, who were at that time just trying to come up with the idea of the parking lot experiments, picking up the pieces after Ronald left the band. Well, the story goes like this, and it's one of my favorites: While shooting their appearance on that fateful episode of Beverly Hills 90210 ('I don't usually like alternative music, but this band rocks!'...asshole) the show's producers told them there would be no chemical or distillate refreshment on the set because all of the castmembers were underage and, like, fragile as little bunny rabbits. Well telling a Lip not to get trashed is like opening up the bottle for him, so they got lubricated before doing their shots, and ended up so out of hand they actually went up to Tori Spelling (you know, daughter of millionaire show creator Aaron Spelling) and asked her where the cute one was, meaning, of course, Brenda. Heh Heh. Seems like they had to beat a pretty fast exit outta there, too.

So, but, you know, back to Clouds. This album is like a more serious, slightly more restrained version of it's predecessor. 'Why is it, if God hears all of my questions, that there aren't any answers?', but you see, by this time we're already inoculated against what seem to be Coyne's banalities because he seems so dang childlike when asking them, like he really, seriously spends days on end wondering about these things, not like he's just trying to make a line rhyme or sound profound. He's a genuine four year old trapped in an aging rock star's body, someone who could dream up the idea of dozens of car stereos playing the same music at top volume, like some sort of a Lee Iacocca wet dream. Because when Wayne just comes up with a line just for the sake of rhyming, it comes out like it was scrawled in crayon. 'This here giraffe....laugh' is typical, but just one of the more inescapable of the bunch. Having yet to go through the painful steps of maturation he took around the time of Zaireeka (and that first became clear on Soft Bulletin), he's still cranking out manzania calliope music, like a cross between a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, Houses of the Holy, and Bert and Ernie Sing The Monkees, and he isn't at all afraid to tackle song titles like 'Psychiatric Explorations of The Fetus With Needles', which serve as nothing other than reminders that this band was once sick enough to successfully tour with Gibby Haynes. Of course, by 1996 they'd upgraded their touring partners to the likes of Stone Temple Pilots and Candlebox, and you hear a corresponding drop in the rock content of this record. It's still ostensibly a rock/psychedelic/punk album ('Kim's Watermelon Gun' is pretty sweeping, but it's more concerned with it's banjo-sounding effect, and 'Lightning Strikes The Postman' rocks this party right down to the holding cell. But, heck, this album doesn't even start off with the hard-rockin' flourish that has become tradition), but the teeth that I still saw evidence of on TFTSGH are filed down and the kibbles gotta be watered down now, if you catch my drift. They play their guitars as if it's their duty rather than their desire, and a lot more effort is placed into the whistles and sound clips and marimbas (marimbae?) than in what they put into their amplifiers. And songs like 'When You Smile' barely have any guitar at all...but this is where I first hear definite and undeniable proof that Brian Wilson (and Lindsey Buckingham, and Paul McCartney sans Beatles, and Phil Spector) are becoming the new influences of choice. Drozd is still a Bonzo-volume drummer, but without the thumping bass drum, most of this would fit well on Top 40 radio.

This is the album of the philosophical great-great-grandchild of 'Five Stop Mother Superior Rain' and 'One Million Billionth...', a slow, heavy aire piece that sounds like the merry-go-round broke down and all the horses are eating the cotton candy. 'They Punctured My Yolk', 'The Abandoned Hospital Ship', 'Placebo Headwound', 'Christmas At The Zoo', and 'Evil Will Prevail' could alternately be described as stately and reserved or downright draggy, depending on your state of mind. Right now, I'm a tired little puppy, and while I'm thankful that the melodies are always present and accounted for and never try to get too obscure on me, I wish we might have just a little more heft on the gas pedal from time to time. For such an artistic record as this one to never have anything approaching a bad song (the only thing I feel is sub par is 'Bad Days', a refugee from Hit To Death which was released on the Batman Forever soundtrack that year. And even it has the couplet 'You hate your boss at your job, you wish you could blow his head off...show no mercy', which, as sung by Wayne Coyne, is equal to hearing a nun use the word 'cunt' in casual conversation.) is damned remarkable, and I really feel this is a beginning of the major transition of this band to be able to function over the long haul. They'd left pure noise, and next they had to have the guts to set down their guitars (more or less) altogether....especially after Ronald left to pursue....well, whatever it is he was pursuing. But I still feel giving this album a higher grade would overrate my pure enjoyment of it. I appreciate it, even love it in fact, but my pleasure receptors are twanged ever so less often by this than Transmissions (or, heck, Ambulance). This is going to become more and more usual with the most recent releases - artistic growth takes over for pure, exhilarating silliness, and oddity replaces the summertime run through the sprinklers that was the Lips in the early 90's.

Capn's Final Word: The end of an era, but probably the culmination of all things Lippy in one place. I never thought the result would be so mid-tempo. What we need is some disco, some 8 Hz tones, and a wacky story about a dog's favorite chew toys.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Zaireeka - Warner Bros. 1997

For concept and originality, this gets an automatic A+, you know, with the four CD's to be played simultaneously on four different machines to get a true 'interactive' sound experience and all, but for pure listening and utility, this is like a C or something. I once was able to put together three at the same time (get yer damn mind out of the gutter...there's children around, you know) but only once, and while the experience was rightfully mind-blowing (I mean real 360 degree sound...understand?), it's such a pain in the ass to locate and collect all those CD players in the same place I'll probably not think of doing it again for some time. I have enough trouble finding time to listen through one CD, what with all this workin' and fatherin' I've got to do all the time, I'm not going to spend a probable 40 minutes just to set up all this stuff. The secret is that you really can listen to just one at a time if you've taken enough chemical assistance. You'll be jamming along to a pretty flagellant display of drumming, or maybe some gorgeous piano, or just some odd noise, but it does make a sort of sense. Me? I've got a mix of all 4 CD's I downloaded off of the ol' Napster some years ago, so I can be completely boring and predictable and just listen to all of it at the same time just like it was a normal record. And the thing is, a lot of this album depends on the concept for it's very existence, for without it, things like 'March Of The Rotten Vegetables' are just so much nausea-inducing tones (I mean that literally....this song comes with a warning about its extremely low-frequency content. Try to get THAT on a Nelly CD!) But all those personal bitches aside, this really is some genius concept...providing you're willing to participate in the creative process, you could seriously never listen to the same album twice...that's pretty cool in this age of lookalike techno-influenced hip-hop-flirting slick-ass product, some of which is actually now being released by the Lips themselves.

Anyway, Zaireeka was the result of another particularly difficult time for the Lips, similar to the period just before Hear It Is when Wayne's brother left the band to join up with something called Serious Fatal Drug Addiction (I hear they rock! But their albums are expensive), or after Priest Driven Ambulance when, like, most of the band jumped ship. This time around it was the departure of ingénue Ronald Jones, who quit to spend time hanging around lame, unprofessional local rock shows in OKC like every single weekend in 1997. Michael Ivins also nearly died in a car crash. But this ain't all for the Lips' near-death experiences, I'll just wait until the next review to fill you in on what happened next.

Anyway, Wayne had obviously squeezed the alt-psychedelia lemon until it ran all down his leg in 1996, and was trying to figure out new ways of blowing heads without actually resorting to buying yet another vintage guitar pedal. This time his idea was 'electronic orchestra', or 'chorus of Radio Shacks', wherein audience participants 'played' a car stereo or boombox containing a cassette tape prepared by the Lips, and members of the band conducted the whole shebang using very scientific instructions like 'when I put my arms straight up, like this, go ahead and turn the volume all the way up, okay?' Needless to say, the experiments were great successes for the sort of misfits that make up a Flaming Lips audience, but the mainstream (and extremely conservative and uptight non-mainstream) music press were concerned that Wayne's marbles had finally rolled into the storm sewer for good. The release of Zaireeka made it all better, though. There was record company approval, so therefore it was okay for the press to bless this show of 'daring' and 'fierce pursuit of originality' and all that crap. Fucking sheep.

Anyway, the songs on the album are pretty much nothing like anything you've heard from the Lips before, other than their (by now) trademark melodies. This is now Lips as New Age music. There is nary a guitar to be heard on the album, but there are banana-boats of orchestras, kettle drums, and choruses of screaming. Some of the songs are further up the Christmas tree than are others, but with an opening like 'Okay, I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand' (reading the audience-members' minds, I see) followed by 'Riding To Work In The Year 2025 (You're Invisible Now)' is likely to throw anyone off like a half-dollar on a rail. I wouldn't even know what adjectives to use for either of these songs, other than possibly 'confusing' and 'haunting'. Atmosphere is everything, I guess. The next song, about a plane crash, is suitable horrifying as well...all disembodied pianos and oboes. After this, our feet touch ground lightly for a short while, and 'The Machine In India' is almost like that Psychedelic Furs song about India. It's the first one that sounds, well, like a song rather than soundtrack music. Oh, but this is really really good soundtrack music, you see, as far as it goes. Things fly off the handle again shortly afterwards, and my actual gut enjoyment of 'Vegetables' and 'How Will We Know?' isn't too great. They're missing that special sort of songwriting touch they've been able to inject into their song for the last few albums, and rather attempt to float across the channel using nothing more than interesting arrangement and thick, foggy atmosphere. The only places I feel the true beating heart of this band are on 'The Big Ol' Bug Is The New Baby Now' and 'The Train That Runs Over the Camel...', both of which sound like Syd Barrett circa-1971 rewrites of Clods Testes Metallica material.

I guess what I'm failing to say here with all these countless paragraphs (do all Flaming Lips albums require so much writing? Jesus! I thought this would be an easy page! After Genesis it is, I guess.) is that Zaireeka should not be entered into lightly. It's not a first purchase, and probably should even be the last. It's expensive (now...I got mine for like 18 bucks in 1997), rare, and requires lots of care to even be enjoyed as intended. And what I'm saying is the process is better than the actual result....getting there is all the fun. If there were an album that requires more input from the listener, both mechanically and expectation-wise, I've yet to come across it. And to get right back to where I started, I'll say again that this is truly a singularity in the music universe. A butterfly in a sea of moths.

Capn's Final Word: If Clouds showed the depth of their songwriting, this shows the depth of their creativity, daring, and originality. But not their songwriting.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Pauly Tamale Your Rating: A Any Short Comments?: I had my doubts, but once you get it all set up, this gimmick works pretty well. I've had the pleasure of experiencing four cd players at once on two separate occassions, once at a "ZAIREEKA PARTY" and once in art class. It's definitely fun to listen to with your friends

bob Your Rating: A+ Any Short Comments?: great site, man. i really enjoyed reading your lips reviews. however, this album is primarily meant to be listened to with all four CDs playing out of different CD players. If you only listen to one, three, or even a mixdown of all four, you will not get the full experience. with all due respect, i don't think you can rate this album acurrately until you've listened to it the right way. obviously you can rate the musical composition from the mixdown, but do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing!

The Soft Bulletin - Warner Bros. 1999

Everyone always seems to write a ton about this record, but I don't feel like doing it. It's great, yeah, but I don't feel like I need to go over every song ad rectumum. It's really quite different than their previous records, but anyone who was following along rather than just sleeping in the back of class saw this 'adult' crap coming as far back as Clouds Taste Metallic. No, not crap. But very, very slow, and very very mature. Sheeit, these guys are like nearly 50 or something. And if you're not a fan of listening to Wayne Coyne's voice, pass on The Soft Bulletin, because he's all over this album like a Miami Dolphin on your mom.

I suppose I understand where all this dour seriousness came from, what with two bandmembers nearly dying, and the father of the songwriter actually passing on, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Just as the mainstream press finally caught on to the Lips as something other than yet another 'alternative' group to patronize and hand out 3/5 star grades while giving 4 1/2's out to whatever shithole pop crap comes out of under whatever rock they spawn under (Semisonic, anyone? Didn't Third Eye Blind get, like, a 5/5 or something?), the Lips decided they were actually better fit for writing twisted Disney cartoon theme songs than rock music. And while their new thing, this kitchen-sinkhole smush of orchestral arrangements, big drumbeats (and plenty of small drum machines, too), no guitars, and lots and lots of Wayne passing on his thoughts on himself and about 'people', meaning, you know, humans other than himself. His 'keeper' lines are a lot less loopy than in the past, like 'I raised my hands and I said 'yeah'....I stood up and I said 'hey, yeah''. Right. Up with people, Wayne. 'The Spiderbite Song' chronicles drummer Steve Drozd's battle with spider poisoning, which nearly claimed one of his limbs for Spain, if you get my drift, and Michael Ivin's car crash. It's not that it sounds like the theme song to Toy Story 3, it does. It's just that, man, I used to understand exactly what Wayne was trying to get at in his old songs, but it could've been different than the person next to me (especially since the person next to me is Saddam Hussein. I keep trying to make him go home, but he won't go.). It was a personal interpretation...now he's all literal and stuff. When he writes a song like 'Race For The Prize', he's talking explicitly about scientists busily pushing the human race towards annihilation. 'Superman' is about heroes who never come. 'Buggin' is, well, the best frigging song on the album besides possibly 'Superman', and is just this little chunk of marvelous, fuzzy-focus exaltation. Oh and yes, it's about bugs, like a version of Pearl Jam's 'Bugs' written by someone who just had the best day of their life. Not about headwounds or dead babies or anything like that! Dammit! And 'Suddenly Everything Has Changed' realises the Lips' dreams of writing a song fit for Pet Sounds. Really. But Pet Sounds is still only an A. Ahh, I guess we all have our idols.

Anyway, themes are serious and heavy, but we get a smile and a pat on the back and feel like, shit, why not keep being good people and not get hung up on it all? 'Superman' failed to be the big hit, but it's the best produced and most accessible song the band has done since, well, forever. It's their 'Everybody Hurts', if you dig. There's still some scattered weirdness, but it's all sort of low-key and academic sort of bizarre, not like it's gonna make your tongue seek out the nearest light socket. Erm...I guess it all was inevitable, this growing up business. I feel like this record gives up the ghost a bit too much, and they wisely get a bit of the ol' goof back on the next record to make up for it. But if you ever wonder what the band sounds like when they're not feeling particularly 'wacky', here you are....it's Wayne as crooner, something that shant be missed by friends and governors.

Capn's Final Word: Growing up is hard ta do...A very strong album, but you really need to be ready for lots of 'smiling through the tears', and music to match.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Bruno Your Rating: A Any Short Comments?: Just to let you know: you say you don't like this album because there's not enough mystery in the lyrics, but my personal interpretation of Race For The Prize was plenty different from the one you wrote as being 'obvious'. So maybe there's hope?

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots - Warner Bros. 2002

You know, I'm just now familiarizing myself with the Butthole Surfers (thank you, Kazaa!) early work, and I was just realising how very lame their two mid-90's attempts at, well, whatever they were attempting with Independent Worm Saloon and Electric Larryland. Getting on the radio, I guess. There's so little of that ol' fashioned Surfer axe-murder (Gibby sounds like a very old man on those records) and instrument torture that it's just so very simple to disregard those albums. They grew up, found they weren't able to sustain their young man blues into their mid-30s, and ended up making music that was well within the grasp of 10 gazillion other bands. See, but I'm not so sure this holds true with the Flaming Lips. Similar philosophies and roots, from the same region of the country, starting off at approximately the same time, same flirtation with radio accessibility in the form of a fluke hit, but when the Lips made the jump over the cliff of Good Taste and began changing their approach, they successfully made music that sounded like them, not techno-distracted cardboard cutouts of themselves like the Surfers. While continuing the process of maturation that Bulletin announced, Yoshimi is actually better constructed than that record, I think, and their return to semi-obscurantism is a healthy sign they won't soon be turning into Tom Petty or anything like that. The focal-point of the whole record is the title-character, a 60's-era Japanimation girl (you know, still like a little girl, and not a pedophile-baiting 12 year old street whore like you'd find in that modern Anime crap) who turns into a hero because she knows karate and won't let the pink robots defeat her. The battle is played out in a sort of Tarkus II suite, all fight noises represented by electronic instruments, although a much more dancable version that features better use of analog synthesizers than anything Asinine, Lick, or (Hair Growing Out Of My)Palm(because I haven't had a date in y)e(a)r(s). Yup, the Moog is now the primary instrument of choice for the band, though its hard to say what exactly got raided out of the bandroom for this record. You've got so many textures, timbres, and titllations harvey-wallbanging everywhere that I find it's just easier to describe the sound of the record as 'synthesized'. Synthetic drums and strings and other hard-to-master instruments are everywhere. Strange...this record sounds like it could've been made by Tangerine Dream sometimes...and other times it sounds like the Tom Tom Club. And probably would appeal to fans of either one. What it may absolutely not appeal to is fans of guitar rock, especially the sort of trod-upon heavy psych-rock that used to be the Lips calling card. Ironic, I guess, but since I feel a little more open-minded than your average Tom Tom Club fan (whoever that person may be. Dwayne Horowitz of Akron, Ohio, I'm looking at YOU.), I find I can love this record in a different, but almost equally strong way as dirt-box Holy Grails like Priest Driven Ambulance or Hit To Death.

Why, you so informedly ask? (Go ahead! Demand quality reviewing from your reviewer!) Well, even though the songs all sound about 20 bpms too slow, and all of this subdued melodicism could quite possibly pass through you like a ghost or a Taco Bell Gordita, but leaving less of a trace behind, it can also feel a lot more like an irresistible force than previous albums have been. Their vision is exceedingly clear on this record, and while I felt almost like parts of Soft Bulletin were kinda naggy, and was way too plain-spoken and insistent for my Lips tastes (I mean, not plain spoken like Love "Take Off Your Fucking Panties Already" Gun or anything...wait, let me explain...ah, shit...I guess I should have just left it alone), this album leaves some things left for the listener to discover. I also like how I don't feel directed by the music at hand....is that Hand Of God Mellotron to be rejoiced, or feared? I guess I don't know...it's all very, ambivalent. Fuck! I've been trying to find a good use for that word all day, and I finally came through for myself. Funny what little goals you can set for yourself when you can never, ever go out and do anything fun since you have a baby that HATES being in the car.

Songs...I guess I feel like some of these work magic on me, and some of them are just simply pleasurable to listen to. 'Are You A Hypnotist??' and 'In The Morning Of the Magicians', both of which could be considered 'multi-part suites' ('Magicians' almost even sounds like certain light prog rock...yaiiiii!), as well as the 'Yoshimi' section are just very successful music, very transportative. And though I feel like it's probably near-filler, 'It's Summertime' is the best pure-pop track on the album....very Beatleesque and very uplifting. So many bands are able to tear shit down all the time, but it's very hard to find a band that so unselfishly builds people up and not come across like Bono. Well, Wayne Coyne certainly doesn't come across to me like a fame-crazed egomaniac, but he does seem like someone who has a very gentle connection to the world, one where his still-childlike observations actually have a lot of merit ('Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die....you realise the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round...' in 'Do You Realise??')....

I had a thought the other day: If I couldn't have a member of my family or a close friend do it, you know, if I had to have a stranger tell me I was terminally ill and was going to die very soon, I'd want it to be Wayne Coyne. Isn't that horribly cheesy of me? But you know, I'd really like to try to get a little of his life-affirming positivity. 'All we ever had is now...' is fucking right.

Capn's Final Word: I'm going to go kiss my baby and my wife, then come back and listen to this album again. You probably should do something along the same lines.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Jake� �sneakthaslinger@aol.com�� Your Rating: A

Any Short Comments?:�� I don't own this album yet(just downloaded a bunch of tracks from it), but it seems pretty groovy.� It broke my little heart to see a picture in SPIN magazine of Wayne Coyne perfoming onstage with a bunny-suited Justin Timberlake, though. *sniffs*

But about the Butthole Surfers and their last two depressingly mediocre albums(don't even TOUCH Weird Revolution with your shell toe), the main difference between them and the Flaming Lips is this: The Surfers have never, at any point in their career, taken themselves seriously.� They also started a few years before the Lips, and ended up being an influence on their music as a result.� So they're a little bit older, and(as far as I can tell) a LOT more scarred from excessive drug use over the years.� So it's no surprise that they seem incapable of making good music anymore; hell, it's a miracle in itself that they're still TOGETHER, as a band.

Eph G ephtheg@gmail.com Your Rating: A+ Any Short Comments?: While you said that this album was about a mid-60's Japanimation girl, you're really wrong. It was written as a tribute for their friend Yoshimi P-Wee, who died in 1999. Just thought you might like to know. (Capn's Response: Is that presumably Miss Wee on the cover, then?)

Nils Westman Your Rating: A- Any Short Comments?: Being an insufferable smart-ass, i just have to point out that the album isn't dedicated to yoshimi P-wee, because well, she is very much alive and well, playing drums for the boredoms, and is actually listed on the sleeve of this album for doing the noises in yoshimi pt. 2, but yeah, the song "it's summertime" is dedicated to a dead friend in japan, they never say her name though. And yeah, this album is very good, is so melodic and just swirls around you with melodies and everything, but it isn't their best, they've releast about six albums that beat this one before!

King Ink Your Rating: C+ Any Short Comments?: Yoshimi P-We (only one e) is very much alive. Look at the liner notes... she's on the damn album! She is a Japanese musician most known for her work with experimental noise band The Boredoms.

Finally The Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid - Restless 2002

The Day They Shot A Hole In The Jesus Egg - Restless 2002
Incomplete

I don't own these very worthwhile compilations from the pre-Warner Brothers Lips, but I feel like it's my civic duty to inform you that you can get all 4 of their first records, even including their original Flaming Lips EP (which I've never even heard!!! I saw an original pressing for sale in Norman, OK once for, like, $35 or something though!!!), which was recorded while they looked like that picture on the cover of Finally. A cross between Oklahoma redneck and the Cure, huh? Well, if you say so. Finally also has Hear It Is through Telepathic Surgery. Shot A Hole is Priest Driven Ambulance and an whole bunch of outtakes I probably have half of, but both of these give me an obscene excuse to rebuy most of a Flaming Lips collection. C'mon, even if all the bonus tracks are shit (not likely, but let's say for conservatism's sake), you're still getting 4 pretty good albums for $50, and at your local Best Buy, too. Try to find Hear It Is at Best Buy....they'll laugh you out of the store and then overcharge you for installation anyway.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

At War with the Mystics - Warner Bros. 2006

The first Flaming Lips album I've ultimately disliked large parts of since Telepathic Surgery from way back in 1988, At War with the Mystics combines a sad tendency for cutesiness and obsession with gimmicky bizarre/trippy/Flipsoid noises with some of the worst excuses for songs in the Lips catalogue. Never has a Lips record felt less like a band performance and more like an arrangement of Cakewalk samples processed through a Digital Compression Crapulator Soul Suck 5.0 ES machine to give it that hollow styrofoam squeal as it spins around in your deck and clips the top of the spectrum in a cavalcade of digital paralysis, and never have the Lips sounded so fiercely against sounding like sincere versions of themselves. So many of these tracks are built around isolated gimmicks and seem to have been included either as part of an elaborate in-joke or just because they were bat-shit weird. Anything but expressing the same level of confessional emotion and heart that Soft Bulletin and (to a lesser degree) Yoshimi did. Because the Lips have now amassed enough critical and commercial good feeling to become one of those Teflon bands that seem to get a free pass with every new release, something VERY few (if any?) of their 80's weirdo peers have been able to do, Mystics may actually be realistically seen as a revolt by the band against that near-Emo soul bearing that they'd become known for. They've consciously returned to the more flippant themes of Transmissions from the Satellite Heart or Clouds Taste Metallic with the exceptions that those albums had strong, guitar-heavy, dense musical backgrounds and Mystics has music that half sounds like clips from a Brian Wilson-EZ Sample CD-ROM and half like the 'irritation' setting on their Moog emulator. Is 'Free Radicals' not supposed to come off like the world's most unfortunate Prince imitation, because it does. Considering that 75% of the rest of the record seeks to recreate Brian Wilson by way of lite-rock favorites like Christopher Cross, the Lips sounding like the Lips just doesn't seem to be in the cards any longer. Not just that there aren't any guitars (the Lips stopped exploring the extent of the Fender Jazzmaster when Ronald Jones left the band in 1996), it's that there isn't anything else that made the Lips what they were, either. John Bonham drums, for one thing...strong melodies for another....memorable songs for a third. The one attempt they make at a 'classic' Lips tune is 'The W.A.N.D.', which is thin, languid, and threatens to rock far more than it actually does. It's a complete disappointment, as is the rest of Mystics as long as you're not so totally in love with lush orchestration as to forgive the endless Wilson tribute/fetishism that dominates so much of this record. The tangible's been replaced by the throwaway, the real is obscured by the contrived, and the chaotic is no longer under the band's command. In short, this album is a mess.

Furthermore, I feel like they're purposefully attempting to regress from creeping maturity in that there are a lot of lines here which just sound idiotic as they come out of the speakers. 'Yeah Yeah Yeah Song', besides insisting on repeating the single most grating sample since 'Me So Horny', asks such earth-shattering questions as "If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch would you do it?' in such a way that it lays on the lesson that power is dangerous with a VERY heavy hand. 'It Overtakes Me' is similarly cloying, going so far as to hack out 'It wakes and bakes me!' as a triumphant rhyme to the title. They even reuse the line 'It's true sometime everything dies' as a tossoff on the overblown noise ballad 'My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion', draining it of all the blood, wonder, and hurt that it held when it was used on Soft Bulletin. I'm not saying that the entire album is populated with the types of gee-whiz navel-gazing platitudes that people used to make fun of the burnout hippie generation for 35 years ago - a dig through the lyric sheet reveals that Wayne still hasn't gone beyond the pale for the most part - but enough of the dumb lines are spat out REALLY FUCKING LOUD so that they're inescapable, and the half-awake mind may very easily assume most of these lyrics are the scribblings of a sad 15 year old who's pissed off because they're stuck in Geometry class instead of banging supermodels.

Speaking of REALLY FUCKING LOUD, one definite problem with this album is its mix - not just all of the stupid buzzes and pops and howls that pop up at completely inappropriate moments to serve as distractions from how generic many of the melodies are - but the fact that EVERYTHING IS MIXED AT TOP VOLUME ALL THE TIME. Never before have I heard as much ugly, brain grating digital clipping on a record - they either fell asleep at the mixing board or have so bought into the idea that their stuff has to be louder than everyone else on the I-Pod so you NEVER FORGET THAT YOU HEARD THE LIPS NEW SONG. I won't forget because I physically can't. This album has scraped itself against my ear canal - I won't sleep because I'll forever hear 'YAYAYAYAYA!!" (from the helpfully titled 'The YAYAYAYAYAYA Song') and 'BZZZT BZZT BZZT' (from the unhelpfully titled but probably accurate 'Haven't Got a Clue'). I'm not one to bitch about trendy modern causes like DYNAMIC OVERCOMPRESSION, but the case here is so severe it can't be let go with a mere wince and a few notches down on my preamp. Listen - Led Zeppelin sounded like Led Zeppelin for a reason, just like Priest Driven Ambulance sounded like it did for a reason - they played good songs well on loud instruments - relying on fucking knobs on the mixing board to do the work is just a cheap way of trying to achieve what you can't do with your instruments.

Therefore, it makes sense that the best songs are the quietest ones, ones like 'Pompeii am Gotterdamerung' which take the orchestration thing beyond mere easy listening Smile tribute and on to somewhere a bit more, you know, worthy. Druggy. Spacey, maybe. But worthy. One could say they've trod this landscape before, this region between Eno and Pink Floyd and Yes and the Butthole Surfers, and they definitely have done it far better than this, but still a bit of the old cough-syrup hiccup is quite welcome when so much of this album is thin songwriting partially obscured by jokey, aw shucks studio noise crap. 'Goin' On' is similarly stripped of a lot of the crap that infests the rest of the record and comes out smelling all sweeter for it.

Listen, we've already realised long ago that the Lips of the early 90's - the Lips which I still love the best - are gone and lost forever. It's now time for the Lips themselves to realise that piling on the old wacky-wacky on songs that are neither served by it nor deserve it (take that any way you wish) are doing themselves a terrible disservice.

Capn's Final Word: When you spend 90% of your time trying to convince people everything your doing is a complete joke, don't be surprised if people begin to doubt that remaining 10%, too.

Click Here to Fill Out the Handy Dandy Reader Comment Form

Jack Your Rating: C- Any Short Comments?: Great review of a poor album. Most critics have caved into the stupid production tricks... thanks for holding vigilant. I read an interview with Wayne in a recent Rolling Stone in which he essentially trashes a bunch of artists (Bob Poopin Dylan included) for fakery/recent mediocrity... bold talk for a man who neglected to come up with a single engaging, original melody for his most recent effort.

Back to the Index