Flaming Lips - Stories of UFOs and metal clouds

Hit To Death In The Future Head, released in '92, marks the Flaming Lips' arrival at Warner Bros. and opens an enviable, fruitful artistic partnership that continues to this day.

It's the last album to feature (albeit sporadic) joint involvement from the two Mercury Rev members, Jonathan Donahue and Dave Fridmann: while the latter would return to work with Coyne and co., Donahue would step away to devote himself full-time to the aforementioned project.

The polka-dot toilet bowl flaunted on the cover sums up the uncompromising, surreal irony guiding the Flaming Lips project. Refusing to back down an inch, the band drenches its major-label debut in irreverence and glee. And so, after paying homage to Salvador Dalí on the cover of Oh My Gawd!!!, here they wink at the Rolling Stones' "Beggars Banquet".

Musically, Hit To Death In The Future Head ties back to its studio predecessors and shows no ambiguous traces of the handover to Warner, aside from a somewhat greater polish and elaboration in the sounds and greater studio resources (more strings and wind instruments in a few orchestral flourishes). It's a transitional album, not the only one of this period; it feels a bit unruly and starts off rather flat, but it's capable of brilliant bursts of inspiration. Take "Felt Good To Burn", an intangible, spectral hallucination evoking John Waters, Robert Wyatt or the "White Album". Or the acidic, pyrotechnic sonic infernos of "Gingerale Afternoon", "The Magician vs. The Headache" and "Frogs", in which echoes of Mercury Rev's "Yerself Is Steam" (1991) can be felt.

The menacing "Halloween On The Barbary Coast", whose title says it all, is one of the Flaming Lips' enduring masterpieces. It kicks off distorted and relentless, in a hallucinated, seductive riff built on two processed guitars; in the background, lysergic effects pile up.

As in its direct predecessor In A Priest Driven Ambulance, the mutual illusionistic suggestions and instrumental acrobatics shared with Mercury Rev are tangible, to the point where it's hard to tell whose hand is behind this or that sonic whirl (not that it really matters).

The album's tracks rarely exceed three and a half minutes and make up a complex, figurative whole, perceived all at once, like a primordial cauldron at a constant boil.

Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, released in '93, represents an irreversible step forward in the Flaming Lips' discography. It's their first fully-fledged pop record, the fruit of a gradual, meticulous studio refinement; the body to the instrumental cohesion and song form the band had been chasing since In A Priest Driven Ambulance (1990).

This record sees the arrival of two new members, guitarist Ronald Jones and drummer Steven Drozd, and marks the temporary departure of producer Dave Fridmann.

So, a forced fresh start. A record saturated with overdubs, with layered over-dub sounds — which is why the band, in a note on the sleeve, urges listeners to play it "at maximum volume"...

Transmissions... is a strategic (though still transitional) work from which the threads of more ambitious future efforts like Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin would branch out.

If the world is devoid of meaning and one stops searching for sense, all that's left is to console and amuse oneself with nonsense: in this light, Transmissions... is a surreal, frantic, uncontrolled festival. A sticky trip of extravagant lyrics, a tour de force of irresistible choruses condensed into centripetal guitar harmonies, fed by deafening, effects-laden sonic debris ("Turn It On", "Pilot Can At The Queer Of God", "...Labia In The Sunlight", "Be My Head", "When Yer Twenty Two").

The result is restless and enigmatic, standing apart within the Flaming Lips' opus. A mesmerizing overload of color and imagery runs through the dazed tremors of "She Don't Use Jelly", the soft, anxious exotic nightmare of "Chewin The Apple Of Your Eye", and the thread-thin outpouring of notes in "Superhumans".

"She Don't Use Jelly" is the single that preceded the album and is one of the most emblematic tracks of that era: it became huge both as a video and as an MTV staple (and not only there). It sets up two guitars in contention, one laying down the phrase while the other brays in fuzz, in a Big Muff distortion typical of grunge.

The whole album is a raid of light-and-shade contrasts, acrobatically swinging between acoustic-distorted and idyllic-cathartic registers. A few blind alleys or saccharine moments don't undermine an overall power that, in its artful shimmer of debris scanned by the "cardiac satellite", amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

Transmissions... may have played a role in the lo-fi pop genealogy of its time, but on closer inspection, here more than elsewhere, the chaos is crafted with artistry and the griminess is deceptive; the result of studio chiseling and editing that leaves nothing to chance.

Providing Needles For Your Balloons is a 1994 EP collecting a few new tracks ("Bad Days", "Jets Part 2"), exhuming others from tribute compilations ("Ice Drummer", from Suicide); still others are pulled from live shows.

Forty minutes of hallucinated psychedelic trance for fans already used to it, but more disorganized and torpid than usual. There's a live rescue of "Slow Nerve Action", the track that closes Transmissions..., rendered gloomy and booming by instrumental devastations bordering on the cacophonous; Bill Callahan, aka Smog, contributes a listless "Chosen One".

The novelty track "Bad Days", festive and crystalline like a miniature funfair, ends up being the most Coyne-worthy thing on this mini-album.

Clouds Taste Metallic arrives in late 1995. Two years on: enough time to digest and react, resulting in an intriguing, original mosaic that blends the band's various sonic eras. The "happy medium" is struck in a magical, anarchic hangover-morning atmosphere, suspended between a wink toward sharp, lysergic power-pop hooks and a fascination with airy, mature, sophisticated arrangement. What emerges is a languid, expansive work, well received by audiences even though it sold less than its predecessor; perhaps paying the price for being less immediate, but, as ever, all the more rewarding the more it opens up.

Wayne Coyne appears transformed, singing in a lunatic style that comes across as an anxious, angelic falsetto, like an incredulous survivor. Almost like an astronaut astonished before uncharted stretches of cosmos: an almost somnambulant interpretive style, later sublimated by his friend and former bandmate Jonathan Donahue on the Mercury Rev's "Deserter's Songs" (1998).

The opening track, "The Abandoned Hospital Ship", is indeed a report delivered in a catatonic state that then turns and flips into a solemn, searing guitar charge, harking back to the acid years. A cry bursts in dissonant, like a powerful neo-psychedelic wind sweeping through the canyon of a Morricone-esque West. In "Placebo Headwound" the form winks at the listener, a triumph of lysergic utopia enlivened by Beach Boys-style vocal harmonies.

On Clouds Taste Metallic the band wisely brings back Dave Fridmann as producer (who that same year also helmed the underrated "See You On The Other Side" by cousins Mercury Rev). The guitars take on a more strategically hypnotic power than in the past, unspooling richly atmospheric textures, instrumental settings that feel almost apocalyptic both in structure and in a Sonic Youth-style free-form sprawl ("Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles").

"This Here Giraffe" ("...laughed...") is yet another vignette of the absurd, a surrealist homage irreconcilable with everyday normality. Steeped in and heightened by lunatic, bright, childlike choruses, this track refreshes the band's repertoire of pop kaleidoscopes in which they excel, and shows no sign of running out of charge.

Portions of fantastical reality are explored in the pop-psych suite ideally formed by the sequence "They Punctured My Yolk", "Lightning Strikes The Postman" and "Christmas At The Zoo", amid soft, dreamlike drapery, velvety astral choirs and metallic roars.

An unprecedented and striking approach of unusual inventive richness (which would find its full splendor and apex in works like Zaireeka), yet not so far removed from contemporaries like Witch Hazel on the excellent "Landlocked" (1995), or Radial Spangle.

In 1997 the band reached a breaking point: guitarist Ronald Jones left the group due to friction with Steven Drozd, who was increasingly struggling with drug problems; Michael Ivins was in a car accident; and the group found itself in a state of deep tension. As if that weren't enough, their record label put them in a precarious position and Coyne's father died of cancer. Out of this turmoil came, surprisingly, the band's most imaginative and controversial album, a quadruple release that requires four synchronized stereo systems to be played correctly.

Zaireeka – as the album is titled – presents itself as a conceptual work before it is a musical one, turning the listener into a composer as much as a listener of the music it contains. Each of the four CDs, in fact, contains only some of the album's audio tracks, which, being designed to overlap perfectly, must therefore start at exactly the same moment. This is nearly impossible, which is precisely why every listen of the album is potentially different from the last (even with four people playing it at once, perfect synchronization can never truly be achieved); moreover, the listener is free to experiment by starting the CDs at different moments, creating a different combination of music each time. Taken individually, however, the four CDs are unlistenable, since they alternate tracks containing only the rhythm section, only the vocals, or orchestral passages interrupted by extremely long stretches of silence.

Years later, on the occasion of a listening party organized by the Lips themselves, a remastered version of the album was released with the content of the four CDs compressed onto a single disc; at last, fans of the band could hear Zaireeka without having to gather their friends and their respective stereos.

The "correct" version of the record offers a sunny, brilliant psychedelia, but never a soft one: the recording gives enormous space to the rhythm section, pumping up the volume of cymbals and drums, which clash with the soft carpets of piano and with delicate guitars stripped of distortion. The songs make no attempt whatsoever to follow the standard song format and resemble film-score themes instead, with their orchestral openings and surprise sound effects (the piercing screams in "Riding To Work In The Year 2025 (You're Invisible Now)", placed exactly when you least expect them, in the middle of an epic orchestral surge), consistent with the band's intention to create a lysergic trip of an album rather than an ordinary collection of songs; indeed, it's impossible to pull out a single song that works in isolation from the rest.

The album's most unusual moments come when Coyne is given free rein to indulge his boundless imagination, as in the collage of "March Of The Rotten Vegetables" or in "A Machine In India", which opens with the most placid acoustic folk before spilling into a wall of strings, dotted with listless guitar notes and darkened by the buzzing of flies. In its more ordinary moments, though, the record tends too often to be mere background music, offering fairly flat songs with just a handful of destabilizing elements scattered here and there (occasionally overdone, as with the grating whistle that ruins an otherwise melodic moment like "How We Will Know (Futuristic Crashendos)").

An admirable record nonetheless, both for its insane concept and for the skill shown in composing disorienting music while actually limiting the use of noise, relying instead on sheer abundance of melody. The sessions for this album would also give birth to the band's next record, the acclaimed The Soft Bulletin, released in 1999, in which Coyne and co. attempt to package their melodic madness into pop songs.

It's an extremely ambitious album, in which the band takes on the role of sophisticated pop songwriters, juggling a considerable mass of arrangements for orchestra, piano, multiple guitar lines (no longer distorted!), heavenly choirs, and the occasional burst of electronics. Put this way, it might sound like the Lips' answer to Mercury Rev's deserter songs, but while the Buffalo band threw itself wholeheartedly into Sixties baroque pop, the Flaming Lips haven't entirely abandoned their rock streak, evident on the production side (just listen to the heavy drums on certain tracks) and resurfacing alongside a prog vein that had until then remained latent within the band's formula. "The Spiderbite Song" (the title refers to a supposed spider bite suffered by Drozd, which was actually an infection from a heroin injection) sounds like Yes reborn in the Nineties, with Coyne gliding along in an Anderson-esque voice over a polished bed of piano and extremely delicate guitars.

"Race For The Prize", destined to become their favorite concert opener, opens instead with extremely violent drums and bursts of strings, dotted with never-excessive touches of piano and guitar; it's an explosion of vivid colors, the absolute masterpiece of their pop phase. Also stunning are the interlocking arpeggiated guitars and cello of "A Spark That Bled", lit up by the splendor of a perfect sonic arabesque and enlivened by dynamic drum breaks.

It isn't a flawless record, however. Its flaws are the other side of the coin of its strengths: the crystal-clear, airy sound often coincides with an excessive pile-up of chaotic instrumental lines, overly stretched-out tempos, and lengthy verses crammed with far too many sound effects (the instrumental "The Observer" is simply dull, and the already-mentioned "The Spiderbite Song" is an orgy of melodic lines that ends up losing all coherence and ruining its heavenly atmosphere). "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton" also comes across as suffocating, this time due to an excess of variations, moving from a graceful little ballet for orchestra and harp to interludes with an extremely heavy synth bass and the odd intrusion of electronic drums, which end up interrupting the lovely, gently pompous, floating chorus. "Suddenly Everything Has Changed" is also somewhat out of focus, while the epic "The Gash" falls victim to Coyne's unchecked ambition, arranged with gospel choirs and overloaded with special effects.

Regarded by many as their masterpiece, The Soft Bulletin is in fact an album not without flaws, made by a group that, while still delivering fine material (like the gorgeous coda of "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate"), still had some maturing to do in this new guise. It's disorienting music for all its complexity and layering, capable of yielding gems of rare beauty as well as lapses into kitsch. Still, it remains essential for the band's breakthrough into the mainstream, opening a new chapter in their sonic and musical exploration, one defined by a lavish, vividly colored progressive-pop, light years away from the raw sound of their early days. It's worth noting that the tracklist differs between the UK and US editions; a remastered version was also released for 5.1 systems.

This new artistic phase isn't limited to a new sound and a more baroque songwriting approach: the Flaming Lips began taking on tour an incredible multimedia show, turning every concert into an orgy of colors, lights, fun and puppets. Expect green lasers tracing moving grids over the crowd, actors in Teletubbies costumes dancing about, firefighters, naked women running across the stage, astronauts, and Coyne himself, in a white double-breasted suit, entering the stage by rolling over the audience inside a transparent bubble, like some kind of sci-fi Vitruvian Man. And that's without even mentioning the colors, smoke, confetti and giant rubber balls launched into the crowd, batted around or popped by the audience. The four of them have managed to turn the rock concert into something resembling childhood play. Is Coyne's voice getting weaker live? Who cares — what matters is surrendering to the whirlwind of sonic (the annihilating wall of sound) and visual perceptions; a genuine psychedelic experience, in short.

The band's new direction continued in 2002 with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, in which the group carried on its progressive-pop saga, this time embracing a range of genres spanning from singer-songwriter fare ("Flight Test" is Cat Stevens' "Father & Sons" run through a psychedelic filter) to the gentlest electronica. Synthetic beats and thick layers of atmospheric synths provide the backdrop to the story of Yoshimi, a character probably inspired by the vocalist of Japanese group Boredoms, and her battle against giant pink robots (the title track is soaked in modulated synthetic voices, robotic indeed). The lyrics are far from as trivial as they might seem, touching on themes ranging from anti-militarism to the relationship between artificial intelligence and emotion. Despite everything, Coyne has denied that it's a concept album, though a sort of common thread running through the lyrics is undoubtedly there.

The psychedelia on this album gradually fades, giving way to a cartoonish pop filtered free of the overwhelming mass of arrangements that had marred certain tracks on the previous record. What remains, however, is the obsessive attention to sound, the overproduction, and unfortunately also the odd moment of gratuitous chaos, like the second half of the title track, a jungle of silly electronic noises and violently struck cymbals. Setting aside this unfortunate episode and a couple of lackluster tracks, what's left is a thoroughly enjoyable record, boasting a spectacular sound and a number of very good songs. The masterpiece is "One More Robot", a sweet electro-pop number about the birth of a robot; along similar lines is "Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell", carried by a great bassline but colored with the soft tones of a piano and a flute. Worth noting are "Are You A Hypnotist?", with its choirs echoing through outer space, and the cosmic folk of "Do You Realize??".

The band isn't at its absolute peak here, but it proves it's still pushing forward in its search for new sounds and languages. The Flaming Lips' pop music is no longer afraid to mix in any element, musical or otherwise, to create brilliant songs. Their music itself has become a robot assembled from the scraps of pop culture and forty years of rock, drawing inspiration as much from Miyazaki's anime as from the dreamy ballads of David Bowie and Steve Harley, by way of the video-game sounds of the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

At War With The Mystics came out in 2006, laying to rest any fears that the band had settled into a fixed style, and proving once again to be a sidestep rather than a straight continuation. Billed as the Flaming Lips' political record, it brought guitars back to the fore: the reference points dig deep into the '70s, and the chosen format becomes a psychedelic pop-rock, drawing on rock, funk (or disco-funk) and soul, alternating softness and spasm, without disowning anything the band had done before, but reshaping it and adding or subtracting something.

On "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" the protagonists are the vocal flourishes riding over handclaps and clipped guitars. The instrumentation is plasticky and crackling, the structure builds and builds, until the song suddenly launches into the starry sky, thanks to spacey synths and vocoder-treated backing vocals.

The result, owing half a debt to funk and half to vocal groups, is engaging well before it's convincing. "Free Radicals" ("you think you're radical, but you're not so radical, infact you're fanatical") is an unexpected and enjoyable number, reciting soul over an electronic beat and flashes of guitar. The other great track in the first half of the record is "The Sound Of Failure/ It's Dark… Is It Always This Dark?". The song opens with a desolate guitar arpeggio, sung in the "sad" register of Damon Albarn, which then opens up into splendid, brief disco/funk riffs, deliciously bitten, underscored by retro-flavoured flutes, before the finale glides back into the opening territory and closes, tenderly, with flute and synth. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion" and "Vein of Stars" instead return to the path of psychedelic pop, the first — older — set amid rhodes piano and electronic chirps, an ethereal slow burner with a great guitar solo, the second moving in clearly Mercury Rev territory.

After the brief instrumental interlude of "The Wizard Turns On…", a jam with vague post-rock and jazz overtones, we're plunged back into funk. "It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big…", pulsing and catchy, is a choral, almost gospel performance, complete with handclaps, shaken up by skittering guitars. The second half of the track changes face, though, picking up the cathartic passages of Yes's "Close To The Edge". "Mr.Ambulance Driver" does even better, with a flawless melody, a warm embrace with a siren in the background. Just as simple is the vaguely Who-like anthem "The W.A.N.D.", hard rock with organ blasts, fired off as if from a cannon.

What follows doesn't lower the bar much, though. "Pompei Am Götterdämmerung" unwinds with epic sweep over a heavily sustained bass, guitars, organ and flute pricked by electronics, ready to narrate the story of a couple planning a suicide, between lyrical openings and rock assaults.

The album could end here, and indeed "Goin' On" is a pure closing piano ballad, just enough to dissolve the tension built up by the previous track.

In 2009 the Flaming Lips returned with Embryonic, a double album running a full 70 minutes and containing 18 new compositions: almost a summa of the most evident tendencies the band had shown throughout its artistic path.

The first two overflowing tracks ("Convince Of The Ex", a kind of new-millennium "Zoo Station", and "The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine") almost seem like an updating of the kraut-electro tensions of Radiohead's "Kid A/Amnesiac". From the third track onward, though, the record takes a psych-oriented turn, tinged with Pink Floyd-esque solutions that are nothing new in the Lips' imaginarium. The fruits of this approach can be traced above all in "Gemini Syringes", in the long "Powerless", enriched by an obsessive guitar solo, and in that self-referentially titled "If". Five tracks feature the name of a zodiac sign as the first word of the title, one of Wayne's quirks, which in this case has an explanation that's anything but convoluted. The band had at some point begun recording a series of free form sessions, and the zodiac signs were assigned as working titles: a synthesis of five of these, almost entirely instrumental, ended up in the final tracklist. For this reason the album largely takes on the shape of a crazed neo-psychedelic jam, with a thousand unhinged shards chasing each other and the occasional old-style instrumental digression.

Among the guests, the presence of Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs!) stands out, lending wonderful naivety to "I Can Be A Frog", amusing herself by imitating the animal sounds cited by Wayne, giggling like a teenager down the phone receiver. The lovely Karen also features in the closing "Watching The Planets", a title that once again suggests a unified conceptual design underpinning the album, almost a virtual interstellar journey.

Embryonic is a dark album, where the themes dealt with concern obsession, isolation, madness, submission, horror and assorted paranoias. Guitar and bass rarely trace out a melodic line, often repeating fixed note patterns, at times oppressive, in keeping with the tension generated by the musical structures. The Flaming Lips let loose with a rocker's swagger only on a stretch of "The Ego's Last Stand", in the technological hard rock arc of "Worm Mountain" and in the colourful "Silver Trembling Hands", capable of putting to shame all the posturing of Animal Collective. The aim seems to be to reconcile with their own lo-fi roots, marrying them perfectly with the taste for grandeur typical of their more recent records.

Obviously, in a 70-minute work not every doughnut comes out with a hole: a few flagging moments lurk within the folds of the spacey lullaby "Evil", the religious mantra "Virgo Self Esteem Broadcast" and the irritating "The Impulse", basically leftover stock from Daft Punk. But overall Embryonic proves to be a bold, taut, hypnotic record, without a single hook to speak of, apparently devoid of logical order and brimming with unconventional structures, showing the courage of a band that, though it has nothing left to prove, puts itself back on the line, taking no small risks.

That same year the Flaming Lips also launched into another, even more reckless operation. A reinterpretation of "The Dark Side Of The Moon", the most beloved, criticised, praised and imitated work by Pink Floyd. Alongside Wayne Coyne are his nephew Dennis, leader of Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Henry Rollins and the Canadian Merrill Beth Nisker, aka Peaches.

On The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon (2009), a relentless lunacy reigns supreme. The mood is drunken, the original's production polychromies are turned upside down by a brazen willingness to roll the dice into Barrett-esque territory (!). A provocation that tends to disorient memory, shown both in the graceless, scraping stride of "Speak To Me/Breathe", and in the shattered vocoders of a rough "The Great Gig In The Sky", stripped of its velvet cloak and dropped in pH by the electroclash accelerations of Peaches, and in the cosmic clowning of "Time/Breathe (Reprise)". In stark contrast, the dim lights of "Us And Them" and "Brain Damage", sung in chorus by a dazed Rollins, only momentarily calm down any other form of interpretive ambition, before the luminous, shred-everything goofing around of "Any Colour You Like" and the closing "Eclipse" reveal the most carefree soul of the sabbath staged by Coyne.

Released only in digital format and played throughout the New Year's Eve night in Oklahoma City, the record is not just a trivial divertissement, but also a small and ingenious retro-futurist analysis of one of the most significant albums in the history of rock.

In 2011 it was the turn of Strobo Trip, another mad and brilliant musical operation. Alongside the two (admittedly very good) psychedelic songs that frame it comes the six-hour massacre of the suite "I Found A Star On The Ground": a drama to listen to, digest, play, just thinking about such a thing is daunting enough. And yes, because, reasoning in grand terms (though the climate for that isn't exactly favourable), "I Found A Star On The Ground" could be considered the greatest (in every sense) psychedelic song of all time, if only because over its six hours' duration the Lips (as usual) cannibalise and regurgitate (in their own way) virtually every sub-genre of psychedelia the human mind has ever dared conceive. West coast psychedelia, sunshine pop, kraut-rock, psychedelic punk, shoegazing, dream-rock, Pink Floyd-style mantras, sonic shamanism, ambient hypotheses, stoner passages, Red Crayola acid trips, Julian Cope cackling with delight, White Heaven screwing Mainliner, sticky stuff à la Animal Collective, well, is there any point going on? You'll really find every possible shade of psychedelia in here.

While not venturing quite as far in terms of sheer audacity of intent, and maintaining an underlying cohesion that makes for a far more digestible listen, Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends wins listeners over more on aesthetic grounds than for the crystalline beauty of its compositions.

Assembled from the EPs the band recently recorded alongside an array of special guests (including Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Jim James, Chris Martin, Erykah Badu), the album projects a psychedelic odyssey that is as dramatic as it is eccentric, in which the "all-star team" comes across as a collection of voices floating like lost souls in hyperspace.

Overall, the feeling that comes with listening to "Heady Fwends" is that, despite the lack (barring a few sporadic exceptions) of standout moments destined to be remembered, the consistency with which the whole album is built makes it a gripping experience in its narrative power, exquisitely poised between evasive irony and portraits of bleak scenarios.

Form becomes content, precisely, in the Flaming Lips' world, and so, within the theatrical fiction in which the guests play ghosts of themselves, nothing is a mere footnote - not even the decision to sell ten vinyl copies containing samples of the "immaculate" blood of the "HeadyFwends". It's the most unsettling way to break the fourth wall of the pop-rock world, as well as yet another stroke of genius in a bizarre art form that engages humorously with the listener's life.

The band's return with The Terror (2013), credited (aside from one track, "You Lust", where Phantogram make an appearance) to the Flaming Lips alone, presents barely ten new tracks, once again far from qualifying strictly as "songs". The mechanical beat of "Look… The Sun Is Rising", punctuated by guitar cacophonies, introduces a new work of musical science fiction that wipes the slate clean of the sugary melodies that once resolved the battles between Yoshimi and the pink robots, and which, rather than putting its sonic layers to use in a fully realized form, lays them out only to deconstruct them. The result is a scenario of stunning aridity, one that's genuinely difficult to navigate. On an album conceived as a vain chase of circular riffs interspersed with excursions into absolute nothingness (programmatic in this sense are the 13 minutes of "You Lust"), it's Coyne's voice that ends up as a non-protagonist in this pursuit of emptiness. Depersonalized and drowned in an ocean of stasis, it ultimately gives way to its android counterpart, a machine for synthetic melodies that only evokes the mirage of its characteristic human imperfection.

Asked to explain the "Terror" that gives the album its title, Coyne himself has recently identified it with the unease generated by the awareness that the world can survive even without love. It's an agonizing perspective, certainly a painful one to put into words, as confirmed by "Try To Explain", a track we'd call an admirable example of pop completeness, were it not so decisively bent on its own gradual dissolution.

No composition, in any case, resolves itself into a recognizable conclusion: every step of this alienating journey is part of a monolithic continuum that desperately coils in on itself, right up to the claustrophobic closer "Always There… In Our Hearts", in which the album's opening riff returns as an intimidating reminder of the impossibility of escape.

In the long run, though, the album risks devouring itself and the listener within the very void it sets out to represent. So it happens that, amid the overall haze, powerful jam sessions propped up by oblique rhythms and catchy melodies ("Butterfly, How Long Does It Take To Die") end up placed in contexts where the intent to express a sense of abandonment blurs with simply leaving certain tracks literally abandoned to themselves ("You Are Alone").

What can never be held against the Flaming Lips, however, is the band's greatness understood as a mimetic ability to become one with the universes they're capable of creating. If, by the end of the album's 55 minutes, the listener is as exhausted as they are marked by the sidereal sadness pouring out of every exasperated guitar distortion, every empty space of melancholy contemplation, or Coyne's resigned falsetto, it's clear that this album manages to sustain itself with dignity thanks also (or above all) to the work done in the post-compositional phase. Call it "craft" if you like, but bear in mind that today there are precious few craftsmen capable of expressing such artistic vitality.

Further confirmation of this comes from 7 Skies H3 (2014), another small-yet-major experimental work from the Lips. The album, released for Record Store Day in a limited run of 7,500 vinyl copies, is nothing other than a 50-minute condensed version of the same-titled piece featured on "24 Hour Song Skull", a hallucinatory trip lasting 24 hours (yes, 24 hours!) that stood alongside another visionary act of madness, "I Found A Star On The Ground", a 6-hour track featured on Strobo Trip.

After the first 8 arid, sorrowful minutes of "Can't Shut Off My Head", the listener is abruptly thrown into the dreamlike vortex between shoegaze and dream-pop of "Meepy Morp", a prelude to the demonic, bad-trip march of "Battling Voices From Beyond", a veritable riot of percussion and menacing, lo-fi synths. This too, in fact, proves to be a record of disruptive expressive force, the offspring of an anarchic, untamed band that has never stopped experimenting with new musical languages to the point of obsession. Along these lines are the kraut-tinged surges of "In A Dream" and the nuclear-winter post-rock of "Metamorphosis", in a stasis that is then swept away by the delirious "Riot In My Brain!!", a track bordering on cacophony, verging almost on Xiu Xiu territory. The true masterstroke comes near the end with "7 Skies H3 (Main Theme)", a sweet, Pink Floyd-esque lullaby that restores to the whole album a glimmer of hope and a faint light at the end of the tunnel. The ending, developed through a synthesized refrain that revisits the record's opening section, confirms that feeling of oppressive closure from which there seems to be no definitive way out.

In 2013, The Terror had opened up a new possible way of reading the Flaming Lips universe. Having swept away the playful elements and quirks that, up to that point, had constantly adorned their concept of psychedelia, the Lips of The Terror shed their cartoonish trappings to bring to light a suffocating sense of paranoia that, in their major works, had merely lurked beneath the surface.

While it's true that the aforementioned work wasn't perfectly on point in every passage, it nonetheless managed to convey the idea of a cosmic desolation rarely confronted head-on by Wayne Coyne and his bandmates, so much so that many identified it as an unprecedented turn toward intimacy.

And it's precisely in the wake of those hallucinated, anxiety-ridden atmospheres that Oczy Mlody (2017) takes shape, likewise dominated by an electronics-streaked psych-rock that gives form to a state of disorientation. But while the new effort from the Oklahoma City group finds its raison d'être within a coherent artistic trajectory, on a purely musical level it drifts without ever finding a foothold.

The opening "How" is already emblematic in this regard: on one hand, the songwriting struggles to take flight; on the other, the dehumanization inflicted on the sonic framework saps the performances of their bite. Lost in a solitude mapped out by skeletal drum-machine patterns, saturated basslines and dreamlike synth-drawn soundscapes, Coyne's voice seems to be the only faint flicker of life, if nothing else in giving shape to a "productive" imagination that wavers between the realm of the fantastical and that of the absurd.

Don't be fooled into thinking that titles like “Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes” or “There Should Be Unicorns” might signal a return to the multicolored world of Yoshimi. That eccentricity, which until four or five years ago had always been the house specialty on the sonic front, survives here only at the lyrical level, where the singer delights in sketching, with childlike wonder, an imaginary world full of marvelous creatures, only to then mock them with scatological humor (“At first there should be unicorns. The ones with the purple eyes, not the ones with green eyes. Whatever they give them, they shit everywhere.”).

The stasis that pervades the instrumental work, however, strips away any sense of wonder, so that the album ends up sounding more like an unfinished conversation, perpetually waiting for a gripping melody to justify its aesthetic choices — a melody that, truth be told, never arrives.

The near-title track “Sunrise (Eyes Of The Young)” – itself a translation from the Polish “Oczy Mlody” – strains to channel the dazed mèlo of The Soft Bulletin without recapturing its expressive power, while the interlude “Nigdy Nie (Never No)” smacks of watered-down kosmische musik. The band's melodic flair finally stirs to life on the sci-fi/noir “One Night While Hunting For Faeries And Wizards And Witches To Kill” and on the pop ballad “The Castle”, released as a single, though its excellent arrangement, with Beach House-like guitars, probably deserved a stronger chorus.

As has become par for the course with the Flaming Lips these days, the record closes with a duet featuring Miley Cyrus, by now more muse than mere “heady fwend” — and, paradox of paradoxes, her turn on “We A Family”, a scaled-down “Do You Realize?”, actually manages to clear the air of the record's general torpor. Too little, though, to divert attention from the evident impasse embodied (right from the title) by “Galaxie, I Sink”, charged with a grandeur that's only apparent, yet ultimately emblematic in capturing a band risking getting lost amid its own intergalactic wanderings.

Some claim the Flaming Lips have already said everything they had to say. We, partly out of trust and reverence toward Wayne and co., think exactly the opposite.

Just a year later, the Flaming Lips are back on the attack with a reissue of their earliest recordings, titled Scratching The Door: The First Recordings Of The Flaming Lips. Truth be told, the band deserves both thanks and blame for putting out a record like this. The fact that they decided to reissue their very first recordings – the two initial demos and the debut EP “The Flaming Lips” – says a lot about the increasing (non)sense of the revivalist phenomenon. The early Flaming Lips sound tired and dated today, and their psychedelia, somewhat clumsy and naïve, when pulled out of its original context and dropped into the heart of the present, comes across as shaky and defanged.

The scratchy sounds seem to have been distilled down: whatever they were meant to be, they've lost their punch and effectiveness, flailing in a futile attempt to survive the insult of time. But there's no escaping time — it's the shrewdest and harshest of judges, the only one able to expose what, beneath the armor, has no soul at all. And that's exactly how these exhumed Flaming Lips tracks reveal themselves: the walking dead, drained of whatever they may never have truly had.

To be clear: however mediocre, the real target of criticism here isn't the tracks on the record, but rather the decision to reissue them. Scratching The Door, musically speaking, fails to take root in the present and comes across as a somewhat pointless relic; so why put it out at all?

The answer to that question holds both the condemnation and the acquittal of the Flaming Lips. If we consider the current state of the revival phenomenon, which kicked off roughly in the 2000s, we can't help but notice how our fascination with the past, now the categorical imperative of the present, is morphing into a genuine obsession: everything belonging to the past is deemed to have documentary and nostalgic value simply by virtue of belonging to the past. This, along with the remastering of the tracks, seems to be the only reason justifying the release of an album like Scratching The Door, an object destined purely for collectors, one that neither glorifies the Flaming Lips' past nor adds anything of substance to the existing material.

Initially released in a special edition available only during Record Store Day, King's Mouth, the fifteenth album from Oklahoma City's eternal psychedelic ringleaders, is now available to everyone.

The story behind the album is psychedelic even without the music — and how could anything born of Coyne's pen not be? One fine day, all of hyperspace, the northern lights, and storms of thunder and lightning got trapped inside the head of a giant child king, who, on another day, sacrificed himself to save his people, dying while holding back an avalanche. Immensely grateful for his sacrifice, his subjects poured molten steel over the king's body to preserve him forever, and began climbing up to his head to gaze, through his mouth, at the magnificent starry universe.

The Flaming Lips tell this fable like court jesters, or ancient rhapsodes, who, besides musical instruments and scrolls, have also brought acid and hallucinogenic mushrooms to the court to dose the assembled nobility. The narrator, likely chosen for his phenomenal British accent, is a special guest: Mick Jones of the Clash, whose spoken interludes alternate with Coyne's elfin vocals.

There are poppier moments (the joyous “How Many Times”), more acid-drenched ones (“Electric Fire”), and others that are solemnly Floydian (the driving bassline of “Funeral Parade”), but it's in the more complex, airy tracks that “King's Mouth” truly dazzles (“The Sparrow”, “All For The Life Of The City”). Another zenith comes with the pompous orchestral sounds, as grandiose as if scoring a coronation, that seal the finale titled “How Can A Head”.

With their sixteenth studio album, American Head (2020), the band led by Wayne Coyne returns to the colorful, more conventional sounds of landmark chapters like Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (2002) and The Soft Bulletin (1999).

Overall, the album paints a passive portrait of American suburban life. Drug-induced euphoria conjures up dangers, physical and emotional damage, situations forever lurking within existential darkness. Chronicles of choices that shatter reality, experiences and consequences that bring about irreversible change, are described here with particular attention to the fraught world of adolescence.

The sonic architecture consists mostly of soft piano chords and acoustic guitars (with bass relegated to the background), joined by various synth patterns rich in effects and orchestral arrangements. Coyne does a superb job filtering his own grim memories through his unmistakable signature style, conjuring up a sinister optimism with distinctly childlike undertones.

The album's highlights include the lysergic journey of "Flowers Of Neptune 6", whose gently plucked guitar and lush piano lines build toward a glorious finale, buoyed by wistful horns. The hazy guitar strumming of "Mother I've Taken LSD" and "Will You Return/ Will You Come Down" march along sweetly alongside strings and effective mellotron solos; striking tracks that show just how capable the Flaming Lips still are of delivering psych-rock of a truly uncommon quality. "Brother Eye", by contrast, plays out in gloomier tones, with acoustic guitar and pulsing piano keys crossed by minimal synth echoes, occasionally pushed forward by booming bass drum, while "God And The Policeman" puts centre stage the extraordinary vocal duet between Coyne and six-time Grammy-winning American singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves.

A more playful rhythm drives "At The Movies on Quaaludes", a story lodged in the subconscious of the most jumbled dreams (or nightmares). The innocence in Coyne's voice makes the tale feel closer to a genuine waking delirium rather than, as the lyrics actually suggest, a life carelessly thrown away. The duality between reality and dream journey is one of the album's central themes, which, when examined calmly and clearly, proves far more rational than it might initially seem.

"American Head" is a timeless adventure: although built on tones that are at times almost too velvety and syrupy, it proves perfectly suited to the album's concept.

Despite the similarities already mentioned with some of their past work, American Head doesn't fall under their shadow, proof of a band that, by now seasoned, has learned to keep its sound constantly evolving. A steady point in Coyne and co.'s up-and-down career, a skilful stage in a winding path steeped in gambles and experiments that are sometimes imperfect. Not bad for a guy who started out as a kid stealing instruments from a church.

Contributors: Alessandro Nalon (band history, reviews from "The Flaming Lips" to "Telepathic Surgery" and from "Zaireeka" to "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots"), Fabio Russo (reviews from "Hit To Death In The Future Head" to "Clouds Taste Metallic"), Stefano Meraglia ("In a Priest Driven Ambulance"), Ciro Frattini ("At War with the Mystics"), Claudio Lancia ("Embryonic"), Giuliano Delli Paoli ("The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon"), Antonio Ciarletta ("Strobo Trip"), Andrea D'Addato ("Heady Fwends", "The Terror"), Lorenzo Bruno ("7 Skies H3"), Federica Romanò ("Scratching The Door: The First Recordings Of The Flaming Lips"), Michele Corrado ("King's Mouth"), Cristiano Orlando ("American Head").

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