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The Flaming Lips Almost Killed Me: At War With The Critics

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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.

Anyone read anything about the new Daft Punk album? What? My sarcasm is tiresome and strained; it both mocks and plays into the future that Daft Punk is already reflecting back at us? Fucking robots. Let’s talk about the Flaming Lips.

Specifically, let’s talk about what other people have talked about when they’ve talked about The Terror. There are two routes here; surveying the entire internet (or just Amazon, where The Terror racks up 3.5 stars in its customer reviews section and makes me question why Consumer Reports doesn’t hire Anthony Lane and Robert Christgau to pen narrative reviews of toasters and microwaves) or choosing your battle. I choose, Iron Chef kitchen stadium style, to battle Jim DeRogatis’ review: “The Flaming Lips Drop A Depressing And Dismal Dud.”

DeRogatis has more cachet than you or me where the Flaming Lips are concerned. That he wrote a biography of the band entitles him to the vantage point he describes in the first half of the review. If you want ad hominem attacks, proceed directly to the comments section—you won’t find them here. DeRogatis’ actual criticism of The Terror is mainly twofold, asserting that: a) the Flaming Lips are not trying hard enough, and b) the theme and tone of the record are insincere and gimmicky.

Maybe there’s no arguing with the first point, as a matter of taste. I don’t know what specific lack of effort DeRogatis is referring to, but plenty of krautrock bands have stretched a monorhythm over eight or nine minutes and avoided being called lazy. And there are new adventures here; Wayne Coyne sings almost the entire album in a falsetto. There is a weird electronic-rock melancholy reminiscent of Air circa 10000 Hz Legend and the Virgin Suicides score. When the guitars get brittle and white-noisy, you can hear a little bit of Flying Saucer Attack. Nobody disparages Flying Saucer Attack, do they?

As for the second argument—that the album’s downer-ism is not genuine—well, that’s a dubious sentiment (or simply a misplaced one if you believe, as I do, that the Yoshimi/At War With The Mystics/Christmas On Mars-era Lips is mostly a farce). I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, so I don’t know what corporate chariot the latest Flaming Lips album flew in on. It’d surprise me if any of these songs got anywhere near the Super Bowl. Coyne’s wife of 25 years left him. Drummer Steven Drozd was, by his own account, going through a drug addiction relapse. Bassist Michael Ivins lost his prescription sunglasses at an Applebee’s in Lawton. The Terror sounds like a reckoning of those events, cycling through the requisite disbelief (“Try To Explain”), sadness (“You Are Alone”) and anger (“Turning Violent”). If that doesn’t come across as “real” enough—a valid question in Daft Punk’s world—then DeRogatis is picking and choosing which parts of the Flaming Lips discography he wants to believe.