Flaming Lips

And one fine day, the punk-rockers dropped acid: "Suddenly, everything has changed". The sublimation of intransigence into total freedom breeds monsters: colorful and rubbery, but monsters nonetheless. One could write a whole treatise on the metamorphoses of Wayne Coyne. Starting a career as experimentalists only to later settle onto more "normal" pedestals is a fairly conventional trajectory, perhaps simply the reflection of artistic and personal growth: one drifts away from adolescent excess to arrive at the more defined shapes of maturity, as the old saying goes, "born an arsonist, die a firefighter". The reverse is far rarer, yet history has handed us at least two unsettling examples: Scott Walker and Talk Talk. Yet when a band starts out wild, tones it down along the way, and then goes back to making a racket even more unhinged than before, the whole affair takes on the shape of a hapax legomenon.

The Flaming Lips' arc fits squarely into this latter, inscrutable category: from the feverish shards of their early days to the fluorescent treacle of success, passing through the crowbar of alternative nursery rhymes, it seemed like just another case of enlightened redemption in a rock key; except that, at the dawn of the 2010s, their madness exploded again in a form more uncontrolled than ever, infecting not only the records and the shows but also their increasingly outlandish side ventures. And the truly astonishing thing is that, through it all, they remained mysteriously recognisable and convincing. A miracle, enshrined — as all miracles are — in a testament that hands down its magnificence: a soft bulletin, in this case.

It's not exactly that "everything changed" overnight in their music: there had already been "Transmission From The Satellite Heart", with that "She Don't Use Jelly" that teleported them from Oklahoma basements to college radio, after two albums that were, all told, more measured and reasonable. But then something went wrong: an inconclusive "Clouds Taste Metallic" baffled critics, unsettled audiences and left departing guitarist Ronald Jones unsatisfied. Down to a trio, their reaction to the setback was borderline insane: rather than making leaner music, they turned their compulsive need to overdub into a dazzling virtue, forcing themselves into ever more obsessive layers of overdubs. There's a good chance that, at least on paper, "Zaireeka" is the most radical album ever made: four interlocking discs meant to be played simultaneously, with different parts of the same songs also functioning as standalone new tracks. An impossible listen, different every time, endlessly breakable apart and recombinable. We're in the vicinity of John Cage, but with melodies and arrangements straight out of the Brill Building.

It would have been nice if no one ever recorded anything again after a work like that. But then, hadn't they just converted to more restrained demons? We've seen suicide-after-success before. But when the Flaming Lips are involved, no prediction holds up: if the avant-garde has renounced pop, pop will take its revenge on the avant-garde.

So be it. Where their burnt-out neurons fail to go, Reality steps in, seemingly infected for a moment by the same delirium: Steven Drozd nearly loses an arm to a "spider bite" (a cover story for a heroin abscess); Michael Ivins gets into a car accident that sounds like it came straight out of one of their songs, trapped for hours in his car (the cause: a windshield smashed by a wheel that had come loose from another vehicle); Wayne Coyne's father succumbs to the cancer that had long afflicted him. Tragedy barges into their surreal little theatre, and the boys grow up all at once. The awakening is abrupt, searing. Their coping strategy recalls that of "Electro-Shock Blues": imploding rather than surrendering to melodrama, but with the emotional shockwave of a serotonin atomic bomb.

And so, the flaming lips deliver their sweetest kiss yet. The fruit of two years in seclusion, "The Soft Bulletin" is Wayne Coyne's pop album, capital letters: a wedding cake, cloying and hard to stomach the way only wedding cakes can be, yet damnably beautiful and desirable. Every track is a war machine: the keyboards raise the flag, the guitars sound the charge, the drums fire the cannons, the studio is the battlefield. The reference points are so obvious that we'll list them purely out of pedantry: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach, but also good old Motown, John Barry's spy-movie soundtracks or the eccentric orchestrations of Serge Gainsbourg, right through to the heretical country of Gram Parsons. Adult, "serious" songwriters, carrying a weight of sadness that's no longer the kind found in a teenage bedroom. The lyrics follow suit: bittersweet, brooding, almost as if wanting to shoulder the unhappiness of the whole human race. The overall feeling is that of a restless dream, the melancholy at the end of a party in a house turned upside down, the comedown from an extremely potent amphetamine or a trip gone terribly wrong. Once the high fades, the golden comet sheds its shine: there are moments of harrowing loneliness, but also of profound attunement with the entire universe, as if all of Creation shared in our pain, and we in its.

It's the album with which an entire generation matures and reckons with its own limitations, a riot of jagged confetti spraying jets of rainbow-coloured blood, a phantasmagoric carnival bidding a grand farewell to the '90s. If "Deserter's Songs" dripped with a dreamlike nostalgia for eras never actually lived, "The Soft Bulletin" stares the present in the face and swells it up like a malfunctioning lymph node.

Is it possible to indulge in grandeur without giving in to bombast? Apparently so, if it's true that the quasi-shoegaze epiphany of "Race For The Prize" sends garlands cascading down yet is too resigned to shoot off fireworks, much like the two mad-scientist protagonists of its laconic tale. It's all there in the frightened tenderness with which Wayne intones "They're just humans with wives and children": a hymn to fragility that becomes heroism, riding the wings of a genuinely spacefaring mellotron. Small wonder it would go on to become the battering ram of their live sets.

"And though they were sad/ They rescued everyone/ They lifted up the sun/A spoonful weighs a ton/ Giving more than they had/ The process had begun": clearer now? Once again it's the mellotron setting the agenda on "A Spoonful Weighs A Ton", first properly seasoned in a fairy tale of harp and oboe, then roughed up by crossfire from slide guitar and synthesizer, and finally left hanging on a thread of piano and drum machine. It's a reckless, capricious imagination driving the arrangements, but the melancholy in the chords is all grown-up.

The chasms of a fading adolescence spill their emptiness into "The Spark That Bled" too: "I accidentally touched my head/ And noticed that I had been bleeding/ For how long I didn't know", Wayne whimpers amid slippery languor and the tickle of a glass harmonica. An infernal trombone lunge, a soundtrack-like interlude for strings, piano and maracas, then the liberating release of a line choked with emotion ("I stood up and I say 'yeah'") and a well-earned lake of symphonic tears, soaked up by a galloping country-rock sponge. It sounds like an endless parody, but it's all dead serious.

In the same way, the flanger-soaked drum roll that kicks off "The Spiderbite Song" seems to have wandered in from some circus act, but that jaunty tone dissolves almost instantly into yet another oasis of boundless sweetness, with Wayne recounting the two friends' arachnid-automotive misadventures while barely holding back tears ("I was glad it didn't destroy you/ How sad that would be/ 'Cause if it destroyed you/ It would destroy me"), before tending to his own wounds with an equally touching balm ("Love is the greatest thing our heart can know/ But the hole that it leaves in its absence/ Can make you feel so low"). The orchestral instruments here become a sinister source of acoustic-harmonic disturbance, almost embodying real life's intrusions into their enchanted universe, yet that Disney-like finale, into which even calliope and theremin sneak, remains as crystalline as the most lulling of dreams.

"Buggin'" is more playful, with a dab of autotune, space-age synths and distorted bass foreshadowing the sticky-sweet sound of later records, while "What Is The Light" proceeds by way of red herrings: it creeps forward warily but soon spreads out into a delicious sunshine-pop cream puff, stuffed with a Hammond organ as sixties as they come. In both tracks, twilight hippie Coyne pours out his faith in some unspecified cosmic Love, at once vital energy and reassuring presence, which in the post-2000 albums would become a rearing lyrical warhorse. In the cinematic instrumental "The Observer", by contrast, more than a little unease creeps in: the bass drum mimics a bare heartbeat, guitar and Wurlitzer argue like two lovers at daggers drawn, horns and strings are a distant mirage and the choirs seethe alien. It would take a supernatural intervention to dissolve so much tension, and the bells of "Waiting For Superman" don't need to be asked twice, only to realise that "He hasn't dropped them, forgotten or anything/ It's just too heavy for Superman to lift", yet another bitter admission from these wise, deeply human overgrown kids with a weakness for perfect melodies.

It's images of imminent apocalypse, instead, that run through "Suddenly Everything Has Changed", but the music seems not to care, ambling along relaxed and doing its own thing, save for that twisted middle-eight coiled into a prog spiral that bursts into "The Gash", a track actually more drawn to certain glam-gospel excesses, mocking itself in a parade of radiant, rousing optimism. Having reached the peak, there's nothing left to do but tumble back down into the valley, as befits any proper mood swing: and so the soothing beatboxing of "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" tries to ease the anguish of being alive into a stunned contemplation of one's own dissolution, perhaps gazing at the cool summer night of "Sleeping On The Roof" amid the faint chirring of cicadas.

Though approved by the band, wizard Paul Mokran's remixes came at the request of a solicitous Warner, keen to cushion its charges' death-defying leaps with "commercial-sounding stuff". For whatever reason, the UK version swaps in "Slow Motion" in place of "The Spiderbite Song". A trivia note for unrepentant freaks: the cover art reworks a photo that appeared in "Life" magazine in 1966, in an article devoted to LSD.

In a feat more unique than rare for a former underground band, no fan has ever accused the Flaming Lips of "selling out": proof that every band gets the following it deserves. That said, needless to say, the promise of a technicolour popstar future would last only as long as a trilogy — an excellent one, mind you: "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" and "At War With The Mystics" are the flawless appendices to this staggering baroque infatuation, soon to be swept away by a lysergic flashback nobody saw coming. The return to the raw fury of their early days with "Embryonic", the inexplicable song-by-song reinterpretation of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" and above all the monstrous tour de force of "Strobo Trip" (its six hours of "I Found A Star On The Ground" setting a new extremist benchmark), combined with ever more pyrotechnic shows and ever more unthinkable collaborations, have crowned once and for all the most unpredictable psychedelic institution in the galaxy, forever teetering between frenzied hype and dizzying conceptual leaps. A rollercoaster ride of a career that, however, has never distorted the naive spirit of these good-humoured small-town boys, who still build their own stages and treat their audience as equals. And at the centre of it all, the pivot, can only be one thing: "The softest bullet ever shot".

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

19/05/2019