Grammy Award-winning band The Flaming Lips have been making music since 1983. Their songs has been used in movies and TV shows and have accumulated many accolades. The Sampler's Nick Bollinger reviews their 16th studio album American Head.
The Flaming Lips Photo: supplied
If you've ever watched the The Fearless Freaks, the 2005 documentary history of The Flaming Lips, you’ll realise how improbable the success and sustained career of this Oklahoma band has been. From their beginnings as a bunch of drug-crazed punks with criminal histories and limited musical abilities, they have somehow become a beloved institution, and made music that has moved the masses.
Photo: Supplied.
Those records they made around the time of The Fearless Freaks - The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Vs. the Pink Robots - still represent the pinnacle of their mass acceptance, and some of their more recent projects have been a little more testing. Tried their dark noise-opera The Terror lately? But their new album harks back to that breakthrough period, and then back a little further.
Sounding like a psychedelic Neil Young, Wayne Coyne is at his most endearing on ‘Will You Return’, the track that opens the new Lips album American Head, soft waves of sound lapping around him as he sings nostalgically to a friend who has possibly died and is certainly lost. It’s the side of The Flaming Lips that made those breakthrough albums so emotionally rich, and it’s the musical location for most of American Head.
As for the geographical location of these songs, it could be Anytown, U.S.A., but thinking back again to The Fearless Freaks it’s pretty obvious that it’s the part of Oklahoma City where Coyne and his bandmates grew up. And the social environment, too, seems to be that of Coyne’s youth, with deviant brothers running foul of the law and bored kids in suburbia seeking heroism and immortality through danger and drugs.
Over the years Coyne’s written a lot about drugs. Along with Lou Reed, he might be the most serious and consistent writer of drug songs a there has been, and along with his eternal themes of love and death, it’s the thread that runs through the new record. He writes matter-of-factly, neither glorifying nor condemning their use. But they cast as melancholy shadow over songs of lost innocence, like the one he’s called ‘Mother I’ve Taken LSD’.
The figure of the mother, too, is a recurring one. Coyne’s obviously cares about his; we meet her, along with his wayward brothers, in The Fearless Freaks. Still, a song here called ‘Mother Please Don’t Be Sad’ goes beyond melancholy and into maudlin, as he reimagines a situation from his youth where he believed he was facing his death. On it’s own it sounds corny. If he gets away with it - and I think he does, just - it’s because of the context he’s set up so well with the other songs.
But truly psychedelic band they are, The Flaming Lips have always been, above all, a sonic experience. And this latest album shows them to be as sonically adept as ever. As with every album they have made for decades now, it was produced by Dave Fridmann, whose particular blend of electronic spaciousness and organic grit seems as much a part of The Flaming Lips as Steven Drozd’s melodic inventions or Wayne Coyne’s winsome voice.
And some of my favourite moments come in the semi-instrumentals that act like palate cleansers between a few of the tracks. The spacious mix of synths, drums, xylophone and what sounds like that Peter Frampton voice-tube thing on ‘When We Die, When We’re High’ is wonderful, funky, and I could happily listen to a whole lot more of it. But leaving you wanting more is another of The Flaming Lips’ skills, and this album of sad, beautiful reflections on youth, innocence, loss and altered states - plus a duet with Kacey Musgraves - is a timely reminder that whenever they come up with more it will always be worth a listen.
Photo: AFP
