the flaming lips

Record #992: The Flaming Lips – American Head (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have had the run that The Flaming Lips had between The Soft Bulletin and The Terror. They managed to several albums of remarkably consistent quality while also sounding nothing alike, traversing from baroque symphonic rock to technicolor glam pop to dystopian psych freakout. While you could easily credit their entire body of work as one of the most singular and inventive careers in music, that period is one of my favorite runs of album in any discography.

I’ve lost track since. I said to some friends recently that I missed when The Flaming Lips were good. It’s maybe more accurate to say that I’ve been unable to keep up with the deluge of projects well enough to sort the inconsequential experiments from the proper albums. But out of this haze, American Head emerges with a seismic scope that combines the best parts of their disparate threads into one immense and gorgeous whole.

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The Worst Debuts From Great Bands

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There’s a certain art to a good debut.

On the one hand, the debut has to be captivating enough that it can stand as a self sufficient statement on its own. On the other, there has to be enough untapped potential to keep future releases from getting stale. It’s generally a bad idea to just keep releasing the same record over and over again.

But sometimes, even great artists whiff it at their first at-bat. In fact, some of the artists responsible for some of the most gorgeous music ever started their careers with albums that barely have even have a glimmer of what they would go on to create.

Disclaimer: not every album on this list is bad per se. They just fail to offer any sort of representation of what the band would be capable of.

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Record #185: The Flaming Lips – The Terror (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Economics teaches us that the more abundant something is, the less appealing we will find it. For example, if you eat one cookie, it will be delicious, but if you eat 30 cookies, you will soon be sick of cookies. For another example, the Flaming Lips released their last record in 2009. Since then, they have released a song-for-song remake of The Dark Side of the Moon, a split with Neon Indian, a USB exclusive track available only inside of a marijuana flavored gummy skull, a 70 minute, 13 track collection of collaborations with everyone imaginable, covers of songs by Madonna, The Beatles, and more, a compilation of their first several records (along with those same vinyl reissues), a URL-exclusive twenty-four hour long psych-freakout track, twelve YouTube videos meant to be played simultaneously, live performances of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi in full, assorted car commercial singles, Wayne Coyne’s constant twitter feed, and on and on and on and on and on…

So, economically speaking, The Terror should simply fade in to the constant barrage of nonsense that Wayne Coyne & Co. is constantly spouting out.

But I guess The Flaming Lips don’t understand economics very well.

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