The Beat Patrol

Another recent review of The Lips’ new psych opus….this time from Nick Annan, on the Clash Music website (Sept. 25, 2009)…

More widely of late known as that band with the crazy stage show, inflatable globe, Teletubbies and all, The Flaming Lips have been busy in the lab and have returned with an altogether more intriguing studio album, Embryonic.

Of course, for those coming late to the party, experimental is what The Flaming Lips do – 1997’s Zaireeka album came on four discs to be played on four stereo systems simultaneously, nevermind the eight years in the making Christmas on Mars film. So now, Wayne Coyne and his outlandish Flaming Lips have unveiled their first double album, the afore-mentioned Embryonic.

Traditionally the format where serious rock bands spread their wings – see The Beatles’ White Album or Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde – head Lip Wayne Coyne states that they sometimes “would have made a better single album if only the artist would have focused themselves, edited themselves, and got down to work and trimmed the fat.” He even goes on to agree that Embryonic may indeed be guilty of just that adding, “Either way it’s too late… the damage has been done.”

Embryonic is all about the band’s more impulsive, spontaneous side, common sense be damned. Maybe their recent mainstream success – their songs have even appeared on television adverts in the US – has fueled a need to cut loose, and Embryonic is certainly a return to their leftfield roots. Recent fans may be sorely tested by the developments herein. Equally, any self respecting music fan will be more than prepared for the going-ons (think a post rock Bitches Brew).

All this talk of excess and experimentation might lead you to assume I’m setting you up for bad news of a self-indulgent mess of an album, and while there certainly are some non-essential tracks here, there is a wealth of killer material, however obtusely the Lips choose to deliver it.

Recording on equipment set up in drummer/multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd’s vacant house clearly gave the band time to play, with those sessions informing the mood of the album as a whole, a group of arty, very talented, friends jamming in someone’s front room.

“Convinced of the Hex” kicks things off in fine style, its “Tomorrow Never Knows” drums startling the listener to attention. Edited down from a ten-minute jam, it sets a suitable mood for things to come, a loped bass-heavy groove and electronic squalls. Already a highlight from the digital EP is “Silver Trembling Hands,” one of the more cohesive offerings here alongside “See the Leaves,” “Worm Mountains” and album closer “Watching the Planets.”

There is a surplus of material with excess minutes spent on song fragments and periods of noodling, “Powerless” being the chief culprit. Coyne’s words come back to haunt him in these, thankfully few, moments.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O appears as a guest “vocalist” on three tracks, “Gemini Syringes,” “Watching the Planets” and “I Can Be a Frog,” providing the requisite animal noises in accompaniment to the main lyrics’ roll call of furry friends. Notable as an example of the band’s sense of fun and childlike approach to creativity, the unique element to their ambitious, high concept, bizarrely titled material rescues and elevates the band from po-faced prog hell.

The gossamer ballads “If” and “The Impulse” are welcome havens from the weirdness, while AWOL – or at least neglected – is their knack for effortless pop nuggets as heard on tracks like the now classic “Do You Realize??” or “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt 1.” Clearly those kind of songs require more spit and polish than the Embryonic sessions manifesto allowed. A return to their earlier head music roots is definitely apparent, and not just in that cover art.

I’ve always seen The Flaming Lips as a band above criticism. Whatever they involve themselves in, you can’t fault their motives or the sheer joie de vivre with which they operate. Embryonic doesn’t change that opinion of them and further scores points for the head-strong manner with which they have assembled, driven and released this double album.

So, yeah, being facetious, it’d be better as a single album, maybe their best album yet, but that would miss the point of who The Flaming Lips are. A group of friends who’ve been a band for a little over twenty-five years. A quarter century years into their career, those by whom we measure longevity in rock, The Rolling Stones, released the career nadir Dirty Work album. Says it all really.

Always the outsiders, even as they headlined festivals and topped charts, The Flaming Lips have returned with a truly great piece of work, flawed though it may be. Fearless Freaks indeed.

Nick Annan

Recent review by Paul Lester for the BBC Music website (Sept. 21, 2009) of the new Flaming Lips “double album” extravaganza (coming out this Tuesday).
I just got finished listening to it online, and off a first listen, it sounds like a brilliant, deeply psychedelic, esoteric work of art. The Lips have done it again. Probably the most consistently mind-blowing band over the past dozen years or more. If only more bands had their sense of adventure these days… 

Another wonderful album from the most consistently inventive American band around.  

The Flaming Lips have called theirs an “accidental career,” which is one way of summing up the haphazard nature of their quarter-century trajectory, lurching from breakthrough radio hits like 1993’s “She Don’t Use Jelly” to quadraphonic experimentation on 1997’s Zaireeka, their only consideration apparently to do whatever the hell they feel like at any given moment.

And so Oklahoma’s finest have decided to follow the commercially successful triptych of The Soft Bulletin (1998), Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) and At War With the Mystics (2006) with a double-CD of their least accessible material since, well, Zaireeka.

Of course, being the Lips, even amid the squalls of noise and synth surges, there are beauteous melodies, but there are no accessible space-soul song-suites as per At War…, nor is there a “Do You Realize??” on this 18-track collection. The closest things are “The Impulse,” a gorgeous simple chord sequence with a vocoder’d top-line melody that sounds like something off Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, and “If,” an odd little fractured ballad sung by multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd that sounds like something from the Alex Chilton or Skip Spence twilight zones.

More typical of this sprawling, 72-minute set is “Aquarius Sabotage,” a screeching, careening brutal/beautiful melee that combines harps and feedback – it’s like hearing three different songs at once – and approximates the sound of early-70s Miles Davis playing the work of Yes. The freak-out, freeform jam session vibe is sustained throughout and reaches a peak of phantasmagorical wondrousness on “Silver Trembling Hands” – imagine Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” performed by Bitches Brew-era Miles, conducted by Burt Bacharach, with Bill Bruford on drums and the Six Million Dollar Man on bass. Typical of the Lips to make the obvious album opener the 16th track.

There are instances of Led Zep-ish power and gossamer interludes, moments when the Lips square the circle between Americana, psychedelia and prog, and special guests including Karen O, Lips heirs MGMT and a mathematician called Thorsten Wörmann – go figure indeed.

Embryonic may not sell as many copies or win as many converts as Bulletin or Yoshimi, but it’s another wonderful album – a veritable trove of speaker-pummelling delights – from the most consistently inventive and thrilling American band, R.E.M. included, of the last 25 years. 

Paul Lester

July 8, 1999 Salon article on head Lip Wayne Coyne, around the time of The Soft Bulletin…  

Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne believes in the thrill of wonder, the miracle of everyday life and the extraordinary sound in his head.

For six years beginning in 1984, when the Flaming Lips wanted to make a point, they turned up their amps. They gave their songs monstrous guitar hooks, surging bass swings and huge beats, all infused with a catholic belief in the power of volume and noise. Around 1990, the band, marshaled by singer and guitarist Wayne Coyne, learned how to record, which allowed the psychedelic boho careerists to refine the noise and play around with cartoony pop for four records. A three-year set of sonic experiments followed, producing a parking lot symphony, a boombox orchestra and Zaireeka, the most adventurous record ever released by a major label – a set of four CDs engineered to play at the same time on four different machines.

The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips’ 11th full-length record, is something else. It trades insanity for practiced weirdness, the whoosh of chemicals for the brightness of everyday life. “I want you to listen to it while you’re eating a sandwich,” says Coyne about the album, talking over the phone from the Lips compound in Oklahoma City. “In some ways it’s so crazy, more so than Zaireeka. Ideas can be of all qualities. That’s the magic of music: It doesn’t have to be about complicated things.”

His music is also, for the first time, subtle. But it’s so dense, so particular, that it’s easy to blow over the surface and pass it off in one or two listens. Stick with it. Turn it up and tune into the way the harmonies bounce off one another, the complexity of the lyrics, the fragility of Coyne’s delivery. The Soft Bulletin is sophisticated pop, a children’s record for adults who still listen to music on headphones.

The Soft Bulletin, if anything, is a record about wonder, the miraculousness of the mundane and the ability of ordinary people to connect with it. It’s also about the moment of discovery, the second that an idea cuts through reason and explodes into consciousness. “The Spark That Bled” is about cinder-block realizations, the times that you feel like you’ve been hit on the head with a colossal idea. For Coyne, the ideas blare like trumpets and fire off chain reactions. This is how he puts it in the song: “I stood up and said ‘Yeah!!’/I stood up and said, ‘Hey!! Yeah!!’”

“['The Spark That Bled'] implies that it’s a human condition to have ideas,” says Coyne. “It’s about how ideas come through your head and how that rejuvenates you.”

He says it another way in the Zaireeka liner notes: “Sometimes this force is so great that it seems to bypass all the usual checkpoints of reasoning, striking with such impact as to make its receiver appear insane, stupid or retarded, but nonetheless invigorated.”

The genius of The Soft Bulletin is that, musically, it uses the marvels of a high-tech recording studio to evoke Coyne’s sense of wonder. Produced by the Lips – now just Coyne, drummer Steven Drozd and bassist Michael Ivins after the loss of lead guitarist Ronald Jones — Dave Fridmann and Scott Booker, the music sweeps and swells, brightly popping out of the speakers. Tinking piano and smooth “oohs” underline soft drum shuffles on “Waitin’ for a Superman.” Synthesizers pick up a whistle, replicate it, and trail off as it fades into the distance on “The Spiderbite Song.”

There’s a certain cinematic quality to The Soft Bulletin, something that places it alongside the Broadway dreams of Mercury Rev’s last record, Deserter’s Songs. The lyrics at times read like plot outlines. And the stories are populated by ordinary heroes: They’re not artists or geniuses, they’re everyday people caught in the throes of discovery. In “Race for the Prize,” two scientists work toward an some sort of cure “for the good of all mankind.” The key to the song is its refrain: “They’re just humans/With wives and children.” The second song, “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” picks up the storyline after the scientists have saved the world. “And though they were sad/They rescued everyone/They lifted up the sun.”

It’s as if the pop effluvia that surrounds us bores The Flaming Lips, but instead of poking holes in it, they manufacture a parallel world for themselves. If pop culture exists in their songs, it’s vintage pop characters like Superman. The group once appeared in the Peach Pit on an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 at about minute 14 of their post-”She Don’t Use Jelly” fame, but its almost impossible to imagine them ever writing a song about it. They’re far more fascinated by humans, relationships and the natural world.

Bugs, for instance, are a regularly recurring theme on Lips records, from “Moth in the Incubator” on Transmissions from the Satellite Heart to “The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now” on Zaireeka. The Soft Bulletin features “The Spiderbite Song” and “Buggin’” side by side. The first is a love letter from Coyne to the band. In the second, the bugs buzz around, “fly in the air as you comb your hair.” For Coyne, writing about bugs is, yet again, an expression of wonder. “I do think normal life is extraordinary,” he says. “Without sounding like some sort of born again weirdo, I do. Bugs are … cool. I think animals and all of those creatures are great things. Sometimes they’re good analogies and good metaphors. Sometimes they’re just fun.”

The Lips might have another fluke novelty hit, but they’re never going to appeal to a huge audience. Coyne’s voice is charming if you’re a fan, but it’s prohibitively whiny for most radio. And the band’s songwriting style skews toward repeated passages, musical echoes and long codas instead of direct verse-chorus-verse structures. Even their nods to orchestral pop of the ’60s doesn’t stand a chance of softening up a mainstream audience: Pet Sounds was the worst-selling Beach Boys record when it debuted in 1966, and didn’t even go gold.

But the Lips are worth watching, partly because they follow the kind of quirky ideas and fascinating brainstorms that you have to sell. The latest brainstorm is a tour revue, “not a festival with smart drinks and stuff,” says Coyne. “I feel like the audience would rather not spend all day watching bands. It’s the summer. We hate going to these shows when all these bands play for two-and-a-half hours. This will be two-and-a-half hours and you’ll get five or six bands. These are quality acts and it will be their best songs, all the hits, with a five-minute break.”

Coyne’s quality acts include oddball Robyn Hitchcock, Japanese pop star Cornelius, electronic acts DJ Kid Loco and ICU, Finnish techno band Panasonic and Sebadoh, the indie rock band that will hugely benefit from a stopwatch. “It’s my take on a variety show,” says Coyne.

Of course a variety show won’t be enough for the Lips. Coyne is still indulging the whimsy that prompted his boombox experiments. The Lips will tour with a small, portable low-watt radio station and at each venue, they’ll pass out receivers and headphones to the crowd. As the Lips play, they’ll broadcast a live performance of themselves to the radios. (Cornelius did a similar experiment in Japan, but he used the radio to add additional tracks to the stage sounds.)

“I did a lot of experimenting at home,” says Coyne. “When I go to a concert it’s the worst sound that I hear. We won’t do additional tracks. What you’ll hear is what you hear out of the speakers with a subtle EQ. It’s really is fun – it makes people involved. And people like it because they can go to the bathroom without missing a song.

Jeff Stark

The always entertaining and fascinating Wayne Coyne (one of the few celebrities I wouldn’t mind hanging out with for a day). These are some notes he wrote about the making of The Flaming Lips’ classic The Soft Bulletin and the false image people have of him as being some drug-addled weirdo (Robyn Hitchcock has also suffered from this image)…

I sometimes think about how quiet the world must have been, maybe a hundred years ago. I say that, having just come back from a walk outside (outside the recording studio which is in Cassadaga, a sparse farming community in western New York) and it was so dark I could not even see my own feet as I walked. But more startling was what I could hear…?? I could hear everything…but it made so little clatter that the mere volume of my breathing drowned out the entire world….I thought, “How torturous this soundlessness would be, a hundred or so years ago, when music and the noises that surround us today – like even just the whir of the refrigerator – could give no shelter from the dead silences that easily provoke anxiety in someone with a troubled mind…not to have the slightest distraction from your worries could prove to be unbearable.” My imagination stops in fear that if, for some reason, the molecular structure of our atmosphere shifted slightly and all sounds ceased – not hearing, but sounds – for even just twenty-four hours, the suicides could be in the millions, myself perhaps included.

Some of the melodrama of my story may be inherent in my circumstances. For years my mind has been filled with the pursuit of sounds. Some coming in from outside, some emanating from within. And I’ve struggled to reconcile the difference between the two – what has been imagined versus what is actually being heard. And sometimes I feel like I’ve taken this path so many times that, if it is done consciously, the logic and naturalness eludes me…kind of like when you say a word over and over, after about ten or fifteen times it starts to sound like gibberish and, if analyzed, loses its meaning. Reality is like that – the more you think about it the less real it seems….So maybe when I was suddenly submerged into this total, empty silence on that dreadful evening walk, it caused me to consider this mechanism of listening that I so much take for granted. And I hope to never be so scared again….It may sound like I am a trembling, drooling, freak who has gone mad….This is not madness; it is, I believe, the very opposite….

I say this only to make the point that I do not wish to be perceived as nuts, mad, drug-damaged or even eccentric….All of these cliches, if they were true, I would openly accept. But since they are wrong I feel the need to proclaim, with some authority, that this image be rejected. Knowing full well that there is a certain amount of insulation and sympathy that accompanies this persona. What I mean is that, when a person is considered “unstable,” he or she is able to do things that would otherwise be deemed “stupid” and get away with it….I have pursued questionable goals, I admit…but I have pursued them with sober determination towards, I feel, an appreciation of new possibilities….

So when we began work on The Soft Bulletin, we were aware of some new vistas that we had opened up for ourselves in the process of making Zaireeka (the 1997, 4-disc set, designed so all four CD’s can be played simultaneously). What started out as an exploration slowly changed to a realization. Let me explain…

The technical work load of Zaireeka was exhausting…having no real blueprint as to how we could make such a complicated recording left us having to, unwittingly, devise a new system of tracking and playback…kind of like having to make your own shovel before you can dig the hole. However, what once seemed impossible after a while became ordinary, and in the course of us “getting our heads around” such huge compositions we started accepting a wider range of sounds for more accurate expression. More precise and more complicated. We had no choice.

Early on we discovered one big pile of unsynchronized music sounds much like another and we didn’t want this. We wanted a variety of moods….We wanted to experiment with unexpected sounds but not sacrifice a song’s emotional impact. We were finding that we had to exaggerate all aspects of the things we liked about our songs. So in the past, we would simply record as many tracks as possible, hope for happy accidents and try to make sense of it at the end of the mix. Now, with the capability of having (if we wanted) hundreds of tracks, the luxury of following a “happy accident” to a more unique sound quickly became a frustrating routine of endless possibilities. The song itself would have to be the guide for the sound. But songs are not ideas – if you have ideas you should be able to hear them in your song. Songs are to a man what crying is to a baby – they communicate the unspeakable with sound. But I do not believe, like some, that the song and the sound can be separated. There is an old saying, “It’s the singer, not the song.” But I would change that to “It’s the sound, not the song.” Songs are vehicles for ideas of sound. And if you think about it, the song itself really is just sound. So anyway, as recording went on, inevitably, some songs were failures. Despite sometimes weeks of doing everything we could, they still would not work in the extended 4-CD form that Zaireeka commanded. These were the songs that began to make up The Soft Bulletin as far back as March of ‘97. What happened was this: after weeks and weeks of willy-nilly reworking a song’s structure, pushing it to extremes in every direction, it would still come out sounding “normal” to us…?? But, and here’s where the evidence of what kind of damage can be done to one’s perspective is measurable, what now sounded “normal” to us sounded “strange” to everyone else. Our odyssey of experimentation had poisoned us and we hope, if we are lucky, to never fully detox from it.

You see, we had hoped that the sonic boundaries that were stretched to the limit on Zaireeka would not retract and continue to allow us a bigger palette to work with – hopefully with an earned confidence to conquer ambitious visions – to communicate “real” expressions, not just references, about the nature of existence, outer space, love, death, reality, melancholy, madness, self-doubt, the victory of optimism, the wonder of things, and whatever else the songs would be about.

So with the simple approach of just using our ears to guide us, not “music culture,” we were, for the first time, truly exploring all sounds and applying them. Any pretense of our past band structure was simply forgotten and, instead of being a singer who plays guitar, I began to take on the role of something like a movie director. I would plot and plan how sounds could enhance our songs and organize our daily undertakings. Often the hardest part of working on such big productions is not knowing if what you are doing is actually any good. To endlessly spend time, money and ideas on something, with no certainty of its outcome, can be very stressful.

But while this journey was worrisome it was also very liberating. It finally occurred to us that we are not performers, we are recording artists….I don’t mean this in a pompous way – what I mean is, if someone was to ask me what instrument do I play, I would say “the recording studio.” The difference being, most bands are made up of performers – you know, singers, musicians, entertainers – and they go into the recording studio and “perform.” Then usually the “producers” just make sure it’s properly recorded, and that would be the finished record….Well, maybe that’s over simplifying. But this isn’t what we do – and really have never done – though I believe, in the past, we thought we were doing conventional recording. Now it’s clear, we have neither the desire nor the ability to do so. I no longer view our exploration and experimentation as a temporary quest. It is the quest…and this, in my opinion, is both the joy and the curse of the curious explorer…the joy of the adventure and the discovery, and the curse of constantly seeking a new adventure and a new discovery….I pause again to say, I am not mad or on drugs…yet.

And now, upon its completion, I feel although The Soft Bulletin is not an experimental record, its identity and its reach are a direct product of experimentation. In a strange reversal of musical universes, the more indulgent and sonically perverse we got, the more commercial we sounded. We have accidentally made a record that is not a response to music that we love or a reaction against music that we hate. Finally, there are no more enemies, and there are no more heroes…just sound. +

- Wayne
February ‘99

In our continued series of reviews on the last five Flaming Lips albums (in anticipation of their upcoming release), comes this review of 2006’s At War with the Mystics, which was slightly below the “genius” standards set by their previous 2 albums, but very very close. 
This April 2006 Uncut review comes from Paul Lester… 

There was something so ultimate about The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, emphasised by its release in the last year of the 20th Century, you expected it to close with this paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard: “End – End of Music.” Although its predecessor, 1997’s quadrophrenic experiment Zaireeka, proposed new directions, The Soft Bulletin was the culmination; a compression of pop’s best ideas into 12 mini-epics of nuance and bombast. The acclaim it won in the critics’ polls and for their live forays in 2000 gave further credence to the idea that this was as far as the Lips, if not rock per se, could go. After this, one suspected, being embraced by a large audience following 15 years on the margins as a cult horrorshow with just the Butthole Surfers for company would cause a loss of nerve.

And yet, miraculously, they did it again in 2002 with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, another record magnificently poised between gorgeous melody and garish electro-noise, between their old life on the fringes and their new status as the mainstream’s weirdo cause celebre. It was their second consecutive brilliant state of the universe address on mortality and dread, transience and transcendence, but surely now, with a million sales and celebrity fans from Jack White to Juliette Lewis, overexposure and their new media friendliness would rob them of their edge. Besides, when you’ve created two records so monumental in terms of production and lyrical content, what do you do for an encore?

Advance word on At War with the Mystics sent alarm bells ringing. There was talk from frontman Wayne Coyne of a return to raw power and doing-it-live, of a retreat from studio artifice towards a more organic and conventional rock attack that could be recreated on the world’s stages. Seduced by success, The Flaming Lips would, it seemed, spend their dotage pandering to young crowds as rock’s token mad uncles.

Then there was the heroin effect. That scene in the Fearless Freaks DVD in which multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd prepared to shoot up showed what a dead end he, and the band, could find themselves down. Narcotic oblivion had destroyed his sense of purpose. Worse, some implied, was that Drozd’s genius was fuelled by smack, and if he did clean up, he’d lose his touch. Either way, a third classic album was looking unlikely.

Then again, from a group who more convincingly than any other convey wonder and joy – and with a Disneyish flourish, no less – a happy ending was inevitable. At War with the Mystics is another extraordinary collection from this late-peaking band. Recorded throughout 2005 with Dave Fridmann at the controls, the swooning/shocking duality of the Lips’ concerts, the pink bunnies and gore-fetishism, is once more reflected in the music, which veers from shattering FX to celestial sonics just as the lyrics jerk between metaphysical despair and juvenile glee.

“Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” the opener, is acid bubblegum that subverts as it affirms. The first single, it’s going to be a pan-generational smash, in spite or because of the dumb know-thyself lyric and call-and-response chorus. The music is dense with detail: there’s an air of abundance here as Fridmann and Co fill every space with sci-fi sounds and micro-melodies, speaker-panning whooshes and digital splutters. “Free Radicals,” a dig at fundamentalists and Donald Trump, pivots around a daft Coyne falsetto and Michael Ivins’ cosmic slop of a bassline: this is funk as envisioned by Frank Zappa and Hanna Barbera.

After the last two albums’ titular obsession with conflict, on this loose concept the Lips assault Bush and his bombing cronies. “The W.A.N.D.” (a recent internet-only single), including the cry, “We got the power now, motherfuckers!”, is hi-tech grunge, like Sabbath produced by Pharrell. On “Haven’t Got a Clue” (“Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face”) the subject of Coyne’s surreal vitriol is probably Dubya, although saying At War with the Mystics is about Iraq is like describing Sgt Pepper’s as anti-Vietnam. Well, it was and it wasn’t.

More than any polemic, The Flaming Lips encourage resistance through rapture. Their not inconsiderable presence stems from the beauty of their, yes, Cosmic American Music. “The Sound of Failure/It’s Dark… Is It Always Dark??” followed by “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” and “Vein of Stars” forms a symphonic soul sequence as madly exquisite as psychedelic Philly, from the Bacharach-ish chord changes to the acoustic-deliquescing-into-electric guitars that sound like Ernie Isley on Mars. Only the Lips could hymn, as they do on “Cosmic Autumn Rebellion,” the twitter of birds on a late-summer’s day. Why? Because they’ve been there, done that, got the blood-soaked T-shirt. On “The Sound of Failure,” Coyne, happy to be sad, sings, “Don’t tell Britney, don’t tell Gwen”, and, even though it’s a critique of the girl teenpop aesthetic, it’s thrilling to hear these former pyromaniacs and rank outsiders referencing an MTV world that’s as much theirs as it is The Strokes’ or la Spears’.

Suddenly, like some rampantly eclectic Playlist, At War… goes prog, Hari-Kiri for some bands, but not these brainiacs with the common touch. “The Wizard Turns On…” brings to mind a manic mid-’70s Herbie Hancock space-jazz Moog instrumental. When “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small… Do I Stand a Chance?” switches from handclaps and robot clatter to heavenly sighs, it’s like discovering an alien life-form that communicates via ecstatic harmonies. “Mr Ambulance Driver” is sublime AOR, its appearance on the soundtrack to The Wedding Crashers in the same year they provided the theme tune to Spongebob Squarepants proving the Lips can do silly and solemn with aplomb. Saving the best till (second) last, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung,” recalling Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days”, features Drozd’s first lead vocal and waves of crashing synths – even non-fans are blown away by this one. Finally, “Goin’ On,” the quiet after the storm, is Rhodes-embellished, Rundgrenesque white gospel.

Maybe we doubted them because Coyne is no mock-recluse feigning intensity of vision. The Lips debunk notions of authenticity – it’s never clear who does what in that studio of theirs in Fredonia, New York State, although Coyne appears to be the Bowie figure, busy conjuring while Ivins, Drozd and Fridmann, his Fripp, Eno and Visconti, realise his grand schemes. But make no mistake, the Lips have done it: three astonishing albums in a row. This marks the first occasion since the ‘Berlin trilogy’ that an artist has climaxed with albums 10, 11 and 12 of their career. It’s official! The Flaming Lips have outstripped Lodger. Now all they’ve got to do is make the next one better than Scary Monsters…

Paul Lester

The Flaming Lips’ brilliant follow-up to 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, this album was every bit its equal and solidified Wayne Coyne and The Lips as perhaps the most inventive, fascinating purveyors of skewered pop perfection in the musical world. 
This review comes from July 15, 2002 — written by Will Bryant for the Pitchfork website… 

I think it’s safe to say that the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison and P.T. Barnum. Like Edison, Coyne is a relentless tinkerer, a visionary experimenteur with a sci-fi fetish and a soft spot for odd technologies. And like Barnum, Coyne is a consummate showman – the hand puppets, the boombox orchestras, the oddball short films, the radio-controlled headphones. In 1984, Coyne was just another Oklahoma dreamer with an amateurish psych-rock garage band and a duffel bag stuffed with thrift-store effects pedals; 18 years later, Coyne finds himself in the position of following up one of the most universally regarded albums since Pet Sounds.

So let’s just come right out and say it: after the one-two punch of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it’s also unfocused and top-heavy, a concept album about robots and karate that, somewhere along the line, strays into languorous, contemplative songs about mortality and death. Nor does Yoshimi always put the Lips’ best foot forward – though Dave Fridmann’s production dazzles, the overdriven drums and orchestral swoons that characterized The Soft Bulletin are often lost in a busy mesh of programmed beats and lazy synthstrings.

The album gets off to a rollicking start with the winning “Fight Test,” a glossy rumination on the call to duty – whether that’s standing up to a playground bully or, as the Lips would have it, an army of rebellious androids bent on world domination. “If it’s not now, then tell me when would be the time that you would stand up and be a man?” Coyne sings over a thick buzz of keyboards, bass and an almost hip-hop rhythm, offsetting his resolve in the refrain: “I don’t know how a man decides what’s right for his own life/ It’s all a mystery.” It’s a stunning pop song – easily this album’s “Waitin’ for a Superman” – with an intensely memorable melody and the conflict of Coyne’s internal dialogue resonating positively on many levels.

Yoshimi takes its first left turn with “One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21,” a slippery detour into glitch augmented with falsetto choruses, reverberating vocals and haywire surges of digital clickery. “Unit 3000-21 is warming/ Makes a humming sound when its circuits duplicate emotions,” Coyne sings over a simple bass figure and ambient tones before the song explodes in a burst of overdriven clockwork. It’s a dizzying, disorienting sound– but once the novelty wears off, you’ve gotta admit it sounds a bit like Steely Dan.

“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Part 1)” rides a simple melody and ridiculously infectious butt-beat as it sets the stage for the album’s short-lived ‘concept’– some entertaining nonsense about an army of Japanese girls training to take on the salmon-hued robots at a kung-fu compound right out of Enter the Dragon. In the chorus, Coyne plays call-and-response with a malevolent synth burble that sounds like a malevolent R2-D2. Its rollercoaster companion, “Yoshimi (Part 2),” scales a slinky, ascending wall of farty synth and distant Japanese babble before the bottom falls out, rocketing into chaotic instrumental breakdowns each a shade more intense than the last. It’s the closest the Lips have come to writing straight videogame music, complete with crowd noises and bloodcurdling screams (courtesy of the Boredoms’ Yoshimi Yokota).

And this is where Yoshimi makes its first misstep, on the sleepy “In the Morning of Magicians.” Though punctuated with bursts of instrumental energy, the arrangement quickly devolves into a thick lite-FM syrup. “What is love and what is hate, and why does it matter?” Coyne wonders over a flitty symphony of Muzak strings. Again, the production is flawless – I especially dig the wavering tape-speed fluctuations on the background vocals – but the song throws the album into a downbeat, overly philosophical malaise from which it never fully recovers. What happened to Yoshimi again? Pink robots… what pink robots?

Yoshimi shines again with the superior “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell,” which pits more existential lyrics over a far more satisfying collage of sounds (vocal samples, snippets of mellotron, a lumbering bass). “I was waiting on a moment, but the moment never came,” croons Coyne, echoing the issues of readiness and bravery “Fight Test” raised, but also betraying Yoshimi’s greatest weakness: the moment never comes.

The closest the Lips do come is on the divine “Are You a Hypnotist?,” if only for the brief return of some actual drums (brilliantly tracked to create some glitchy, idiosyncratic fills impossible to play in real life). Coyne indulges in wordplay such as, “I have forgiven you for tricking me again/ But I have been tricked again/ Into forgiving you,” as the song builds to a distorted swell of fuzzy static and some otherworldly choir.

“Do You Realize” buzzes and clangs with overproduction, as Coyne breezes through a list of trite observations like, “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?” and, “Let them know you realize that life goes fast/ It’s hard to make the good things last.” Its parallels with Mike + the Mechanics’ “The Living Years” are uncanny, and believe me, it hurts me more to say that about a Flaming Lips song than it does you to read it. The already unsubtle onslaught of church bells, woozy background harmonies, and strings ascends into supreme levels of cheese with not one, but two key changes midway through, becoming a near-parody of the genuine emotional weight that carried The Soft Bulletin. And the minor-key Beatleisms of “It’s Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers)” are wasted on more childlike philosophizing: “Look outside/ I know that you’ll recognize it’s summertime.” After the grandiose, symphonic universalisms of The Soft Bulletin, could it be this record’s deepest message is “stop and smell the roses”?

Apparently so, as the self-explanatory “All We Have Is Now” retreads these themes for a third time, albeit with an uncharacteristically fragile beauty. All of this might have some ironic poignancy if, god forbid, Coyne were to be diagnosed with some terminal illness tomorrow (and indeed, the latter half of Yoshimi was reportedly inspired by the death of a Japanese fan). But in the context of this album, Yoshimi simply runs out of emotional punch, having expended its boldest moves and most resonant sentiments in the first five songs.

Bafflingly, Yoshimi ends with “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia),” an anticlimactic instrumental punctuated with distant vocal warbling, laser-beam bursts, and sudden fanfares of trumpet. It didn’t have to be this way, judging from the wealth of stronger material widely traded online by net-savvy Lips fans. The evocative “The Switch That Turns Off the Universe” (previewed in a 1999 BBC session) would seem to be a perfect fit with Yoshimi’s cautionary tales of techno-doom. Or better yet, the Yoshimi outtake “If I Go Mad/Funeral in My Head” (now set to appear as a single b-side), an instant Lips classic in which Coyne seemingly conjures rainstorms, orchestras, and deafening applause on command.

Despite this album’s disappointing brevity (45 minutes, padded with two instrumentals), its dense production and well-crafted melodies offer long-term replayability. Moments like the Coyne-as-robot “I’ll get you, Yoshimi” barely audible in the title track, or the interchangeable “I must have been drifting”/”I must have been tripping” background vocals in “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell” seem tailor-made for bull sessions around the alien-head bong. Though Yoshimi could be considered guilty of adhering too strictly to a tried-and-true formula (fast beats, slow melodies), it’s really the more disparate elements that keep this album from building emotionally into a classic. And so, like a double feature of Drunken Master and Terms of Endearment, or a surprise party where the surprise is that your best friend has cancer, ultimately Yoshimi is kind of a bummer.

Will Bryant

The Lips’ first album after releasing their 1997 4-CD experiment Zaireeka. This endlessly creative album takes what they learned from that effort and creates their most fully realized album (although a case can be made for their next album). Now ten years old, this album still retains all its brilliance and innovation. It made alot of “Best of the 1990s” lists and was sometimes called a Pet Sounds of the 90s. Wayne Coyne’s singing, though not nearly as good as Brian Wilson’s, does capture some of Wilson’s childlike innocence, as well as his flair for whimsical lyrics and melodies.  
This review comes from the All Music Guide website, written by Jason Ankeny in 1999… 

So where does a band go after releasing the most defiantly experimental record of its career? If you’re the Flaming Lips, you keep rushing headlong into the unknown — The Soft Bulletin, their follow-up to the four-disc gambit Zaireeka, is in many ways their most daring work yet, a plaintively emotional, lushly symphonic pop masterpiece eons removed from the mind-warping noise of their past efforts. Though more conventional in concept and scope than Zaireeka, The Soft Bulletin clearly reflects its predecessor’s expansive sonic palette. Its multidimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies, heavenly harmonies, and orchestral flourishes; but for all its headphone-friendly innovations, the music is still amazingly accessible, never sacrificing popcraft in the name of radical experimentation. (Its aims are so perversely commercial, in fact, that hit R&B remixer Peter Mokran tinkered with the cuts “Race for the Prize” and “Waitin’ for a Superman” in the hopes of earning mainstream radio attention.) But what’s most remarkable about The Soft Bulletin is its humanity — these are Wayne Coyne’s most personal and deeply felt songs, as well as the warmest and most giving. No longer hiding behind surreal vignettes about Jesus, zoo animals, and outer space, Coyne pours his heart and soul into each one of these tracks, poignantly exploring love, loss, and the fate of all mankind; highlights like “The Spiderbite Song” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” are so nakedly emotional and transcendently spiritual that it’s impossible not to be moved by their beauty. There’s no telling where the Lips will go from here, but it’s almost beside the point — not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade.

Jason Ankeny

Perhaps the most bewildering, inscrutable, maddening and brilliant (?) album to ever be unleashed upon the world, Zaireeka is a 4-CD album that is meant to be played on 1, 2, 3, or preferably 4 stereos simultaneously, in order to hear every piece of the puzzle. I’ve only been able to ever play 2 of the CDs at one time and even in that limited capacity the album was a mind-blowing experience. Wayne Coyne took The Lips to a new height with this album and has never looked back since then.  
This review comes from Keith Cameron in the Jan. 3, 1998 issue of the longtime British mag New Musical Express… 

In the realm of musicological discourse, the term ‘genius’ has been overused virtually to the point of obsoletion. So it bears stating at the outset that with Zaireeka the Flaming Lips are threatening to reinvest the notion with its original resonance. Clouds Taste Metallic from 1995 found these fecund Oklahoman zonk rockers pondering, “Where does outer space end?,” before somewhat inevitably concluding, “It’s sorta hard to imagine.” Well, Zaireeka is the sound of grown men trying so hard to get their heads around the rudiments of astrophysics that in the process they flipped out and invented nothing less than a new way to listen to music.

Here is an album comprising four CDs, each containing the composite parts of the same eight songs. Thus, in order to hear the songs in their entirety, you need four separate CD players playing simultaneously. Okey-dokey. 

Clearly, this provides the average Lip-loving household with a major logistical problem. Unless you have unlimited access to a large indoor car park plus three mates with in-car CD players (Zaireeka was inspired by head Lip Wayne Coyne’s ‘Parking Lot Experiments,’ where up to 50 cars played specifically arranged tapes in unison) or can afford to hire a club with four separate PAs, the obvious solution it to invite aforementioned three mates round to your place, ensuring they bring their hi-fi systems as well as some beer, and make an evening of it. 

Indeed, Zaireeka’s bizarre format seems at least partly motivated by a desire to introduce the notion of audience participation to the hitherto relatively passive practice of playing an album. The thing is, once you’ve counted everyone in and hit those start buttons together, you’ll be glad of the company of those helping hands. For even by the Flaming Lips’ synapse-searing standards Zaireeka is a titanic bedazzled trip to the furthest reaches of the imagination. The song titles alone betray the presence of visionaries: ‘Okay I’ll Admit That I Don’t Really Understand’;’ The Train Runs Over the Camel But Is Derailed By the Gnat’; ‘The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now.’ But it’s ‘Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)’ which most immediately repays the effort required to actually hear. Guitars soar overhead like parabolic tracer bullets (CDs one and three) as a heartbeat emits slowly from CDs two and four, which also provide ghostly, distorted echoes of the main themes. According to Coyne’s sleevenotes (copious, useful, highly entertaining) the song concerns a man who imagines he’s a secret agent on his way to save the world on a futuristic train, during the course of which he believes that the pressure is too much and he goes insane. The man is shocked that he could fantasize so vividly and he screams – loudly, out of all four CDs at around 3mins 20secs. 

Granted, on paper this sounds messy and mighty pretentious, but in the sensurround flesh it feels unprecedented, like Sun Ra conducting The Beatles in 1967 with orchestral arrangements from Brian Wilson and a teenage Neil Young on vocals. Only with bigger amps and much, much better than that could possibly ever be. 

What’s more, every time it gets played Zaireeka will sound different. Or that’s Coyne’s theory, anyway. he reckons that although they get close, CD players don’t play in absolute synchronisation with each other. Thus, subtle variations and new arrangements appear at every session. And while it would be possible to listen to just one CD at a time and get a passable interpretation of each song, without the extraneous noises – in the case of the lavish Disney-esque ballad ‘The Big Ol’ Bug…’, the sounds of Wayne’s dogs in his backyard – the ever-evolving collage is incomplete. There’s even one track, ‘How Will We Know? (Future Crashendos)’, featuring ultra-high and low frequencies on three CDs which “can cause a person to become disoriented, confused or nauseated” (it does), and should not be listened to “by infants” or “while driving.” Just imagine the carnage it would cause if listened to by infants while driving…mad, you say? The maddest aspect of Zaireeka is surely that a Time Warner company sanctioned its creation in the first place. That and the fact that the Flaming Lips have released arguably their most beautiful music in a vivid new design for listening and ensured that relatively few people shall hear it. to reiterate: a work of genius.

Keith Cameron