The Flaming Lips

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What's brilliant about it? Just sounds like a silly campfire song they threw together in a couple of minutes. I mean, I guess that's the appeal, but it sounds like such a throwaway compared to masterpieces like In the Morning of the Magicians, Do You Realize (same sort of thing but with immeasurably better lyrics) and Ego
Tripping. I certainly don't need to hear it live again, and I think they've played it at nearly every show since its release.

I second what Cobbler said: they need to remember Clouds Taste Metallic exists. I'd kill to hear Bad Days.
 
I second what Cobbler said: they need to remember Clouds Taste Metallic exists. I'd kill to hear Bad Days.
They played Bad Days when I saw them in 2009 :wink: I think they played Lightning Strikes the Postman also. I'd love to hear Abandoned Hospital Ship.
 
Seconded on Abandoned Hospital Ship. My favourite Lips song. Pilot Can's another oldie that would be great but man, while they're doing full albums, Clouds would be special. Though I guess a lot of it was Ron Jones.

I like Yoshimi 1 but prefer Yoshimi 2. Ego Tripping's my fav from that album.
 
Yeah Lightning Strikes the Postman hung around in the sets for a while. I got a slightly shorter set when I saw them last because Sonic Youth co-headlined, so nothing unusual that night.

I can't wait to see You Lust live. That's going to be on some crazy Careful with that Axe Eugene shit.
 
Looks like they're the "big name act" (there's usually just one or two) who will be at the Capitol Hill Block Party this summer in Seattle.
 
The cover will be something along these lines:

images
 
Another Ronald Jones album would make me the happiest man on earth, but I think this project offers the potential for similarly fun times.
 
The song was cool. Wayne was holding a fake baby the whole time. And Drozd has a righteous moustache.

Louis CK and Rachel Maddow were also on the show. A good night for my boy Letterman.
 
If you haven't seen it before, then you also don't know the whole story. It's Tums.

It’s what they’ve been doing away from the microphones and guitars that has fans of both artists in a tizzy. Coyne tweeted a photo of white powdered lines, a razor and a rolled up dollar bill with the caption, “Yep… recording with Ke$$$$$$$$$ha!!!” The Cannibal Queen herself sprung onto Twitter to diffuse any potential scandal, writing, “Those are crushed up TUMS by the way. That wayne is snorting for his diarrhea.” That may be the one scenario in which we’d rather it be an illicit substance — we just got a really gross mental picture from that.

http://popcrush.com/kesha-flaming-lips-new-record/
 
I can't find the article right now, but there's a pretty amusing anecdote from Wayne about it. They were in that recording studio and there was a glass mirror on the table and he was like, "Well there is only one possible purpose that thing can serve" so he took a bunch of tums, crushed them up and then took the picture you see before you.
 
I listened to At War With the Mystics for the first time in several years today.

It's pretty bad, relatively speaking.

I'm not certain when the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song completely wore out its welcome for me but that, coupled with the always-unbearable Free Radicals has to be the worst start to any Flaming Lips album since the late 80s. It's not that they're horrible songs, it's that they're fairly bland or one-note songs that are being consciously smeared by ecstatic production that inadvertently draws attention to the lack of quality they're compensating for. Pitch-shifting and backmasking mediocrity doesn't suddenly make it great.

After that rocky start though, there is a wealth of great musical moments. Sound of Failure is a gloriously epic track. A real shame then that Wayne is so off his game lyrically. Autumn Rebellion has an incredible musical climax but it's in service of the corniest lyrics he's ever written. Vein of Stars has that incredible opening line and it could easily anchor a great song about agnosticism, but then he goes and tackles the topic with cannonball finesse. Fuck. Most of these tracks are fantastic from a musical perspective but are almost impossible to sing along to because the lyrics are so insipid. I wish I could say that's only an occasional problem, but It Overtakes Me and especially Haven't Got a Clue are inexcusable, and of that ten or so minutes of music, only the second half of It Overtakes Me really sticks. Again, interjecting studio chatter into a track doesn't make it any more likable.

If this is their dad rock album, they really deliver in a few spots though. And I mean that in the best way possible. The W.A.N.D. (Zeppelin), Pompeii (Pink Floyd circa Meddle) and The Wizard Turns On (Steely Dan circa Royal Scam) all do a terrific job of capitalizing on their influences while being strong songs in their own right. The lyrics also don't get in the way for once. Sadly, Goin' On destroys that great closing run by sounding almost impossibly synthetic and meaningless while simultaneously tackling the same existential subject matter that Yoshimi covered with more grace.

Thank God they dialed down the production for Embryonic. If they had tried to "top" AWWTM, we would have all gone blind and deaf.

The Terror is better too.
 
Well I wonder how long they're going to ride this sound. Finally listening to this as I got it in the mail yesterday and I successfully avoided any leaks. After Sun Blows Up Today, color me underwhelmed. Kind of seems like part two of Embryonic, which I wasn't super excited about as a whole. Definitely better than the Pink Floyd cover album or Heady Fwends, but some of the production gimmickry (all that spoken word shit needs to go the fuck away) is getting a little old. Maybe the lyrics on this are better than At War, but the melodies and hooks on At War are far, far more memorable. After one listen, this sits in the lower-middle of the Lips' albums I've listened to. Maybe that's too soon to say. I'll listen to it more today. But for this general genre, I liked Youth Lagoon's new album better.
 
I couldn't remember one second of that Youth Lagoon album when it was finished. So boring. I can understand why people would feel the same way about The Terror, but at least The Terror is a very memorable listening experience. It instantly grabbed me, even if individual tracks did not.
 
And I'm the exact opposite. The Youth Lagoon album kept me interested all the way through the very first time I listened to it and has grown on me like crazy since then. Upon second listen to The Terror, I feel as underwhelmed as my first listen. Like, where the hell did the Sun Blows Up Today sound disappear to? That was fantastic. This feels a whole lot like Zaireeka meets Embryonic with less memorability than either of those albums.
 
If Sun Blows Up Today had been stuck in the middle of this album, it would have been one of the most surreal moments of an already bizarre career.
 
Oh, yeah, no doubt. I didn't mean where did the song go. I meant where did that particular sound go. An album full of songs with that sort of sound would have been fantastic.
 
Haha OK. Well, maybe next time. They're on this Embryonic/Heady Fwends/Terror shit now and I love it but I doubt it will last long. People forget how short-lived the grandiose Soft Bulletin period was (7 years in the context of a 30 year career, with Zaireeka as an undefinable transitional record) and define them based on that. We're 4 years into this one, but I doubt we'll get more than one more album out of it. Maybe we'll get some Sun Blows Up Today type stuff. Maybe we'll see a resurgence of their 90s noise pop phase. I'd love that. More Transmissions and Clouds Taste Metallic, please.
 
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