They can still cause catharsis

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They can still cause catharsis
They can still cause catharsis
Anonim

It's not easy with the Flaming Lips. In a somewhat hackneyed way, they used to say that they were America's answer to Radiohead. Somewhat gloomy and abstract lyrics, strange, eerie, silky male vocals, and also an experimental band, who are famous for having some strange sound, gadget or surprising switch in almost every track. These transitions are the most exciting, you can never guess when such a typical turn will follow, which will suddenly explode from a slow, so-and-so number into something huge. And all this is done in a way that is not clever, instructive or grandiose at all.

Some shock

THE-TERROR-FINAL
THE-TERROR-FINAL

The Flaming Lips oeuvre is accordingly quite varied, in one song they mostly bring a singer-songwriter line that was popular in the previous decade, in another they have some strange mix of country, and in a third they write a huge party number. Listening to them, one can easily get the feeling that these musicians are well versed in everything, and one can also run into the depressing definition that they play the thinking man's rock music. Despite this, the band couldn't become disliked, because all their songs are filled with a certain swagger, as if they don't take it all that seriously.

By the way, the American band is not considered young at all, they were founded in 1983, and they had to wait a long time for their big breakthrough. Only 1999's Soft Bulletin brought them success, which was almost the last celebrated rock album of the last millennium (the American Pitchfork, which is considered to be the most telling and decisive magazine, rated it 10/10). In fact, it was one of the last great rock albums to be celebrated uniformly. The Flaming Lips' career has been relatively unbroken since then, and 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was perhaps even better than their breakthrough ninth album.

At first only throbbing

Their previous LP, Embryonic, on the other hand, brought a strange change in the music, as if they didn't take it so lightly. The Flaming Lips were often characterized by some kind of melancholy, but from Embryonic - with one exception - I only remember gloom. Of course, the only exception was I Can Be a Frog recorded with Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, which was saved by the singer imitating animal sounds on the phone. There was a lot of fear that Terror would be even grumpier, because the leader of the group, Wayne Coyne, broke up with his girlfriend, who they had been together for twenty-five years, not long before.

The first track doesn't start badly, at first it's as if the mp3 player has frozen, but they build a hypnotic track out of it, but it quickly confirms my fear: the Flaming Lips have changed a lot compared to the way I knew them and the way I loved them. The dreamlike vocals start, and at the same time the choppy guitar playing starts, which recalls Steve Albini's legendary noise rock band, Shellac. The second track is much more veiled, at first you can only hear pulsation and some electric bubbling, which then becomes almost as noisy as when MZ/X visited the Mézga family.

Here you can already see that Terror is the kind of record that people really love and respect, but they only listen to it once a year at most, if they even pick it up at all. A round whole, with quieter, more meditative parts and wilder numbers that follow each other in such a way as to give the greatest possible experience. No numbers can be plucked from this cloth, or it will lose its power. They still go overboard with the more than ten-minute Lust, the album sits below it, with two high points, but they are also distributed in such a way that we are left with no surprises at the end, and the album ends in a way that we haven't heard anything interesting for minutes.

Even fewer gamblers

One or two times, they are able to cause a small surprise, catharsis, or if you like, shock with a change or an unexpected sound, but there is no doubt that they have now moved farthest away from song-like songs. This direction could also be discovered on the previous record, Embryonic, because the music just flowed with each outstanding moment. Even then, listening to the Flaming Lips was such that at times it was more like background music, you could step out of it, and then when they shook themselves, you could get back into their world again. This time there were even fewer catchers, but it's still worth listening to once or twice.

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