Will repeated listening to the Flaming Lips‘ dark, depressing and intense new album drive you insane? MAGNET’s Matthew Fritch aims to find out. Welcome to the Terrordome.
If I were Wayne Coyne—and I am definitely not Wayne Coyne, because he would use a better pseudonym—I would begin this post with 40 seconds of synthesizer drone. That’s a joke for those of you who have heard The Terror, the 13th album by the Flaming Lips. The Terror is the subject of about as much controversy as can be stirred up by a rock album these days, which is to say that it is a stylistic left turn by a known artistic quantity, and some people don’t like it one bit.
Here’s the situation: A well-liked, seemingly well-adjusted band that had lately become known for its lysergic sense of joy and outright gimmickry (the bunny suits, the plastic bubbles, the movie about Christmas on Mars) releases an endless bummer of an album—it is dark, and somewhat experimental, and we’ll have plenty of time to dissect it in the coming weeks. Upon first listen to the album last week, it is my opinion that it’s the greatest thing the Flaming Lips have done in years; possibly better than 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and far removed from the band’s shiny-happy pop of the 2000s. I immediately knew I’d become obsessed with The Terror, similar to the way I knew I’d be spending a lot of time with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Sister Lovers or Alligator the first time those albums graced the CD player or iPod or whatever.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not hear The Terror for the first time in its entirety. Who does that? I typed “flaming lips the terror full album” into the YouTube search box and said a little prayer. It wasn’t successful (believe me, plenty of other old and new albums are there for the free listening), but it did turn up two album tracks, “Turning Violent” and “Try To Explain.” Here is the former:
I listened to each song three times to make sure I didn’t repeat what I now refer to as The Foxygen Incident. That occurred a couple months ago when I made an impulse iTunes purchase of the entire Foxygen album after hearing “San Francisco.” Aside from that song, fucking Foxygen fucking sucks. Anyway, I looked at the deluxe iTunes version of The Terror for $2 more, felt cheap and decided I didn’t need the pair of bonus tracks. I’m down $9.99, and I’m going to get my money’s worth.
I don’t know what this series of weekly posts is going to be like, or how long it will take. I hope I don’t kill the thing that I (currently) love. We’re going to do some deep listening. We’re going to talk about the Jim DeRogatis review. We’re going to find out why Jonathan Valania didn’t write more about the album in the MAGNET cover story on the Flaming Lips, and why he was kind of evasive when Coyne asked his opinion of it. There will be a hastily conceived infographic. This exercise is self-indulgent and indulgent in other ways, too. Let’s see what happens when you review an album for a few months.
