When he left, he took the idea of a traditional, guitar-driven sound with him, leaving the rest of the band to find a new purpose. Guitarist Roland Jones quit the Lips a year after the release of Clouds Taste Metallic. “All said, ‘Thanks but no thanks, man / But to be concerned is good’.” In some parallel universe, listening to it every year on 24 December is as cherished a part of the Christmas ritual as watching The Snowman. “The elephants, orangutans / All the birds and kangaroos,” sings Coyne, over a sweet Beach Boys-like melody, underpinned by fuzzy, sludgy guitars and the sound of cymbals crashing like Christmas bells. There’s just one snag: the critters don’t want his charity because, even though they’re miserable, they’d rather organise their own jailbreak and save themselves. It’s Christmas Eve, and a young Coyne decides to spread some Yuletide cheer to the local zoo by freeing all the animals. One of the Flaming Lips’ most charming songs, from 1995’s noise-pop spectacular Clouds Taste Metallic, with a premise so cosy and heartwarming it could be turned into a children’s picture book. Moth in the Incubator is a brilliantly trippy triptych that comes on like three songs cut-and-pasted together: it starts with a hazy acoustic strum, then it explodes into a nasty intergalactic jam with Coyne droning “I’ve been born before, I’m getting used to it,” like a reincarnated zombie, and finally finishes with a grand flourish of soaring noise, like magical sparks of sound whizzing overhead. Transmissions from the Satellite Heart is one the Flaming Lips’ best albums it’s also one of their strangest and most ambitious, where throwaway ditties about girls who think of ghosts are scant but there’s plenty of sonic weirdness, from the pop-crunch of Turn It On to the dizzy heights of Oh, My Pregnant Head.
It’s hard to know what those same newbies would have made of the album from which it came, though. She Don’t Use Jelly didn’t do for the Flaming Lips what Smells Like Teen Spirit did for Nirvana, or Creep did for Radiohead, but it came close: in 1993 it became their biggest hit and an unlikely success, eventually peaking at a career-high No 9 in the Billboard chart, and introducing them to a new cluster of fans. “It’d be so kind to see your face in my door,” sings Coyne sweetly, and even though it’s a line stolen from Carole King’s So Far Away, it’s used to make something entirely their own. The Sun, in particular, is a splendid little thing, with its wicked, misshapen strings bending this way and that as guitars bloom and burst. By 1992’s major label debut Hit to Death in the Future Head, though, Coyne and his bandmates – including Mercury Rev guitarist Jonathan Donahue – had learnt to marry the odd flights of fancy with canny pop nous. The band’s first studio three albums were patchy, their line-up was constantly chopping and changing, and they had to wait seven years and four records for their first great LP, In a Priest Driven Ambulance, to arrive.
But it took some time before the music lived up to the creation myth. The Flaming Lips were always blessed with the type of origin story that could have been lifted from a comic book – it’s easy to imagine flipping through the pages of The Adventures of Young Wayne Coyne, the tale of a normal kid from Oklahoma whose life was turned upside down when he spied some musical instruments in a church hall and, on a whim, decided to pinch them and start a band.
He would later explain the Flaming Lips ethos: “We wanted to sing about shit that we truly didn’t understand, but then we would come up with these lines that cut right to the heart of things.” That was their essence: to find pockets of meaning in the most peculiar places. “You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t,” he howls.
“I was born the day they shot JFK / The way you look at me sucks me down the sidewalk / Somebody please tell this machine I’m not a machine,” babbles frontman Wayne Coyne, before suddenly turning into a psych-rock savant who’s stumbled upon some deep, dark secret. Witness the sweet spot they hit on this ramshackle alt-country stomp, from 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. At their very best, though, Oklahoma’s finest have produced wonderful and strange pop music that, for all its oddness, is littered with sublime little truths. They’ve struggled in recent times to produce anything more striking than some by-the-numbers wackiness with Miley Cyrus. There’s a tendency, in 2016, to think of the Flaming Lips as rather soft-bellied beasts – glitter cannons, confetti explosions and laser-shooting hands.
0 kommentar(er)
