AMS Album of the Week 17

The Flaming Lips have come a long way since their debut album. Hear It Is, released in 1986 (not even kidding), was a grungey, noisey garage punk affair that few will even recognise as the psychedelic pop band who would cause such a stir in later years. From 1995-2002 the Flaming Lips released the holy trinity of neo-psychedelia with the completely nuts Clouds Taste Metallic, the beautiful The Soft Bulletin and the commerical behemoth Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Since then they’ve been a little less consistent. 2006’s At War With the Mystics took Yoshimi’s commercialised direction with little of the sincerity whilst 2009’s Embryonic returned them to their experimental roots with mixed results. In and around that we’ve had a Pink Floyd cover album, a collaboration album featuring Ke$ha and Chris Martin and a 24 hour song you could buy encased in a real human skull (not even kidding). This is their first proper album since 2009, so where have Wayne et al. decided to take us this time?

The answer is disappointment central. I feel like I came to this with reasonable expectations. I wasn’t expecting another Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi. I had already come to terms with the fact they would never scale such peaks again. I have assessed their stuff since then on in its own merits and been impressed every time. The problem with The Terror is that for the first time in 27 years the Flaming Lips have done something boring. You can say what you want about releasing a 24 hour song you could buy encased in a real human skull, but at least you have something to say about it. There’s just not really anything here worth discussing. It reminds me a lot of the afore mentioned Hear It Is. The first track is fantastic and then it tails off. It’s a band who obviously have something but this is only a glimpse of what they’re capable of. The problem is that they are obviously on the other side of the peak now. On Hear It Is you can attribute it to a band finding its feet, hear it is (see what I did there?) a band losing them. Hopefully I’ll be proved wrong, and they’ll recover. For now though, a dark cloud hovers over me: I am not excited about the next Flaming Lips material.