![]() “So with the world ablaze / I’m in an acid haze” Ke$ha sings in her signature style (unabashed and wholly believable) before we’re treated to a glorious synth breakdown and an blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Biz Markie cameo. The opening salvo “2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)” mixes Timbaland-like vocal swoons, a shuffling handclap beat, and a single clipped guitar strum played ad infinitum to create what is essentially the flip-side to Prince’s “1999”: the world is ending, so let’s get high. And now, we are treated to The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.Įssentially a “best of” of the band’s recent gamut of collaborations, Heady Fwends retains the fantastically beat-up textures of that made Embryonic so sonically fascinating, but while that album sometimes bordered on the serious, Heady Fwends is off-the-cuff fun. Then a bunch of oddball collaboration EPs from the likes of Neon Indian and Prefuse 73. Then a 24-hour song contained in an actual human skull. Then a six-hour song contained inside a Gummi skull. Then came their star-packed Dark Side of the Moon remake. Reveling in this newfound freedom, the band put out a double-disc effort in 2009 called Embryonic that complete abandoned what had become the “traditional” Flaming Lips sound, taking all of the scrappy details of their early days (in-the-red drum breaks, armies of budget-brand keyboards, vocals drenched in blown-speaker fuzz) and marrying it to their modern-day songwriting chops, resulting in an album that was darker, grittier, and weirder than anything they did in the past decade. The lackluster At War with the Mystics came out in 2006, and while it wasn’t an out-and-out failure by any means, it still traded in the band’s knack for honest emotional heft for wry (and dated) pop-culture references, which - while disappointing at its core - managed to free the band up to do whatever they wanted after the fact. You see, after releasing two masterpieces in a row, even Coyne was wise enough to know that the impossibly high expectations couldn’t be topped again. Had they not, we may never have had the ramshackle joys of The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. Thank goodness they fucked up after that. Then, of course, we had that glorious one-two punch of The Soft Bulletin (1999) and the awe-inspiring Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002), and it was pretty much settled: the Flaming Lips had turned into one of the greatest bands working today. Yet over time, Wayne Coyne’s cryptic tales began finding their heart, and by the time 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic came out, fans knew that something was changing deep inside the band: their songs were getting warmer and sweeter, all without having to sacrifice their love of the bizarre. It’s kind of great to hear the Flaming Lips truly not give a damn anymore.īack in the late ’90s, these Oklahoma-bred psych-rockers slowly built up an acid-drenched following with their absolutely oddball, out-there (yet-fully realized) psych-rock sound, releasing albums filled with in-joke weirdness and drug-addled insanity to a slowly swelling cult audience. Wayne Coyne to PopMatters, 27 January 2012 And so I found places that can do what we want them to do quicker. I just started to say, ‘Well, I’m going to find somebody who can help me do it quicker and better and not so much bureaucracy.’ And I didn’t know if it would be three weeks or if it would be four weeks. When I asked how long it would take, they were like, ‘Well, if you can get the music to us, we can get you maybe a demo, a master that you can listen to in six weeks,’ and I can’t take six weeks. ‘We just can say, ‘We know how this shit works, and we are going to move ahead on this.’ When we made that Neon Indian record that, I believe it was March when that came out, we recorded it and in six days actually had a record in our hands. “‘Nowadays we don’t really need to give us money,’ Coyne says. ![]() Wayne Coyne to PopMatters, 20 January 2012 Because it’s hypnotic, and it’s not punishing, and it’s not disorienting, and it doesn’t require your full attention.” So you know, when we want music to go on for an hour, we present it you as something you can handle for an hour. Frontman Wayne Coyne gives us a walkthrough the vinyl experience and talks a lot about blood.“I wouldn’t say we know a lot about music, but we know a lot about the way our audience listens to music, because they’re like us. What exactly is it? Well for starters, check out the tracklist as it might serve as some motivation to set an alarm for tomorrow morning. In time to get your paws on this: The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, a double album pressed on two high-quality, multi-color vinyl discs housed in separate custom art jackets and poly bagged together. After you're done baking yourself into oblivion, make sure you wake up in time for 4/21, Record Store Day 2012.
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