Before we turn to the Flaming Lips’ 15th studio album, it’s worth considering the extremely peculiar path that has brought the Oklahoma trio to this point. They began life as a minor psychedelic alt-rock band with seemingly zero mainstream commercial potential beyond hand-to-mouth survival, on the same US post-punk gig circuit that supported umpteen bands with zero mainstream commercial potential in the mid-80s. When they were signed to a major label in 1991, it looked like one of the grandest acts of folly yet in the crazed search to find the next Nirvana: their debut release under their new deal was an EP called Yeah I Know It’s a Drag, But Wastin’ Pigs Is Still Radical. Like a number of bands signed in the post-grunge goldrush, they had a minor novelty hit – 1994’s She Don’t Use Jelly – and that appeared to be that.
And then the damnedest thing happened: the Flaming Lips released the extraordinary 1999 album The Soft Bulletin, developed an equally extraordinary live show and became something like a mainstream success. Its successor, 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, sold half a million copies in the US alone and won a Grammy, which the Flaming Lips seemed to take as a signal to let their imaginations run riot in the most confounding way. They released unwatchable Christmas films, 24-hour long songs, experimental double albums that frontman Wayne Coyne promoted with the suggestion that it “would have made a better single album if only the artist could have focused themselves”, a series of releases on which they covered The Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut in their entirety, a collaboration with Ke$ha that was pressed on vinyl containing Ke$ha’s menstrual blood, etc.
On the one hand, hooray for a band resolutely refusing to cave in to commercial pressure. On the other, a lot of this stuff has definitely muddied the water between “fearless and unbridled artistic experimentation” and “apparently just testing everyone’s patience for the sake of it”.
It says something about their releases in the intervening years that King’s Mouth has been greeted as a concise return to form: a concept album accompanied by an immersive art exhibition and a children’s book, about a monarch with a giant head that contains galaxies and weather systems, narrated by former Clash guitarist Mick Jones. The latter’s contributions are very much in the vein of Stanley Unwin’s appearances on the Small Faces’ 1968 psychedelic opus Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, and, it has to be said, don’t make much more sense than the inventor of Basic Engly Twenty Fido enquiring if you’re sitting comfortabold two square on your botty. It’s a moot point as to whether Jones sounds either rapt with innocent wonder as he reads, or like a man who hasn’t got a clue what he’s supposed to be going on about.
Still, after pausing for a moment to reflect on the reaction of the spittle-flecked audience at the Roxy in 1977, had they been informed that the Clash’s guitarist was going to end up narrating a psychedelic concept album about a monarch with a head that contained galaxies, it’s hard not to concede that the advance publicity on King’s Mouth (initially released in a limited vinyl-only edition on Record Store Day) is correct. Despite the concept and accompanying folderol, what lies at its heart are a succession of songs more straightforwardly appealing than anything the Flaming Lips have come up with in years. Only the brief instrumental Mother Universe speaks of the kind of self-indulgence that’s marked out their recent releases. It’s nothing as craven as a direct return to the sound of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – it’s comparatively stripped-down, less widescreen in its musical ambitions, more obviously reliant on electronics that sound like electronics rather than a dense patchwork of samples – but it shares with those albums the sense of a band marshalling their energies and abundance of outre ideas into relatively short, honed, lushly melodic bursts.
At their best – Mouth of the King, All For the Life of the City – the songs here are a total joy, reacquainting you with certain strengths the Flaming Lips have tended to obfuscate on recent releases. Multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd has the ability to mould a wildly varied set of musical backdrops into a cohesive whole – the album goes from the fidgety distorted funk of Feedaloodum Beedle Dot to the 10cc-ish AOR of The Sparrow to the cinematic, choral sample-bedecked instrumental Funeral Parade without seeming disjointed, largely because whatever style they’re essaying, it somehow always sounds like the Flaming Lips. Wayne Coyne can still project childlike wonder and homespun wisdom without sounding cloying. From Do You Realize? to Waitin’ for Superman, Flaming Lips’ biggest songs have frequently hinged on presenting lyrical ideas that look a bit trite on paper, but gain a peculiar, affecting emotional heft when delivered in Coyne’s wayward, fragile voice. It’s a trick much in evidence here: Giant Baby finds him reflecting on his mother’s death and concluding that “life is sometimes sad”; on the concluding How Can a Head, he’s gawping in wonder at the powers of the human brain.
How Can a Head is the album’s highlight, blessed with as lovely a melody as the band have ever written. Luxuriating in it, you’re struck by the sense that you should probably enjoy it while it lasts. If the Flaming Lips’ recent history has taught us anything, it’s that their next album will probably be confounding: abnormal service resumed.
What Alexis listened to this week
William Doyle: Nobody Else Will Tell You
The artist formerly known as East India Youth continues down his own idiosyncratic singer-songwriter path on a psychedelic exploration of suburban living.
