It’s interesting, now, to re-navigate through The Flaming Lips’ back catalogue, mainly to join the dots that have led to this point. The last few Lips albums have been heavy with all the bells, whistles and collaborations Wayne Coyne, Stephen Drozd and Michael Ivins could throw at them, always fascinating, if not always hitting every mark. Since 1999’s sublime ‘The Soft Bulletin’ and its 2002 successor, the equally enamouring ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, the band has taken on the mantle of eccentric ringmasters. Anyone who has attended a Lips live show will attest to the jubilant, confetti-fuelled circus act it has become, with Coyne at the helm like a muso William Castle.
Somewhere along the line the band’s live image has become disengaged from the Lips in their recorded form, belying the often dark themes that run through their discography. ‘The Terror’ is the band at their spaciest and most immersive, an understated vehicle in comparison to the recent pairing from this last decade of the Lips oeuvre – the raucous, political, and more overtly ‘guitar’ album ‘At War With The Mystics’ and the sprawling ‘Embryonic’. With ‘The Terror’, The Flaming Lips have produced an album to be spoken of in the same breath as their turn of the century high points.
This feels like their most personal work – taking into account Coyne’s recent separation from his wife, and Drozd’s ongoing battle with addiction – insular and introspective to the point that it at times feels claustrophobic, as if the band has closed ranks to all but the core members and eschewed the concepts that have typified their last few years (a 24-hour song; chocolate human hearts and gummy skulls containing USB keys; track-by-track re-workings of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘In The Court Of King Crimson’, the ‘Heady Fwends’ collaborations) It must also rate as the darkest thing they’ve done, yet it’s a wonder how something so stark can be so embracing.
Look…The Sun Is Rising is almost familiar territory. Abrasive scratches of the guitar pepper an inventive, unmistakably ‘Lips’ syncopated drumbeat, until the sinister chant-like vocals falter at the song’s coda into an unsettling, dislocated sci-fi chill. For the most part on ‘The Terror’ that distinctive clattershot drumming is reined in. Instead an undulating percussive pulse variously slows, and quickens to panic-attack proportions, providing a constant towline through the album. Try To Explain is the record’s first moment of swooning, airy beauty, with Coyne addressing an estranged lover, “Try to explain why you changed”, or indeed his own band – it’s certainly not the first time he’s reached out in such a personal manner to his colleagues.
Coyne has rarely shied away from addressing the heavier themes in his lyrics, nor the confessional, and the preoccupation with death is never far from the surface. The album’s mid-section is its most opaque. The Terror begins – almost trip-hop – disorienting until the vocal gradually becomes enmeshed in the vibrato synth and overarching siren tone, before receding into an echoing, isolating distance. Its industrial groans run into You Are Alone, where the ebbing and surging synths menace a vocal that is almost synthetic, insisting “You’re not alone” only for the backing vocal to refute.
A bass-driven Butterfly (How Long It Takes To Die) misleads with the garden path couplet of “If you’ve ever really seen a sunset/ You will see how long it takes to die” lulling the listener into a saccharine image before hitting with the sucker punch, its guitar snatches all the more startling by their sparing use. Turning Violent pulls the pulse rate once more, as vocals plead “turn off” and whispers hiss alongside.
Pink Floyd is most overtly recalled in Always Be There, In Our Hearts, the mantra of the title and a background “1-2-3-4” inevitably leading somewhere; it’s as if those guitar flurries from Butterfly have metamorphosed into something larger, more powerful and distorted. Pink Floyd’s music, and ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ particularly, is a constant reference point – where ‘DSOTM’ conceptualises a human life, the ‘The Terror’ sees it out. The thirteen minutes of You Lust form the album’s central axis, with a simple four note synth melody forming the mainstay. The confrontational “You’ve got a lot of nerve/ A lot of nerve to fuck with me” is all the more arresting, the sudden f-bomb at once menacing, in comparison to the album’s languid opening trio. Extra-terrestrial effects, sirens, rumbles, hisses, and marches all add up to a collage that then unravels over a repetitive loop, and a whispered, reptilian rasp repeats “Lust to succeed”
Coyne’s voice is usually a distinctive element in a Flaming Lips album; here it’s largely unrecognisable. His vocal is for the most part high register and coated in effect, more of a blend with the other sonics rather than a ‘lead’ instrument, and the results are all the more atmospheric for it. In this spacey, druggy album of dystopian grandeur, the band melts into one another as a unit like they haven’t in years. Vocals merge with effect, effects dissipate into harsh signals & tones; the strands of each song are woven into one other so thoroughly that it seems an act of vandalism to press stop at any point. It’s a seamless work that flows darkly and majestically through its suffocating themes – “Overwhelmed”, Coyne repeats toward the album’s close, and so are we… but for a different reason.