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The Flaming Lips Almost Killed Me: Is It Gettin’ Heady?

FlamingLips

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.

In the previous post, I interrogated Jonathan Valania, the author of MAGNET’s recent Flaming Lips cover story, and discovered, well, more about myself than about Wayne Coyne or The Terror or the location of Michael Ivins’ missing sunglasses. A brief aside about the Wilco comparison in that entry: I nearly forgot that, when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out and the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart revealed the deep rift between Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, I had a crackpot theory that the album’s call-sign abbreviation, YHF, translated when spoken aloud to “Why I Hate Jeff.” Maybe Bennett knew his days with Wilco were numbered. Maybe he didn’t even come up with the title.

These are the odd scenarios you concoct when an album becomes part of your life. Last month, I spent an evening with Quentin Stoltzfus, ostensibly interviewing him about his new band (Light Heat, whose excellent album just came out*) but often talking about other bands, albums, the Philly psych-rock scene circa 1999 and what he called “deep listening.” We fought like hell not to let the conversation devolve into a kids-these-days lament about short attention spans and the internet, but Quentin shared two things that speak exactly to that theme. One is an anecdote about a night featuring repeated playing of a Stereolab/Nurse With Wound split to a member of Fleet Foxes and blowing that dude’s mind. The other is that Quentin is friends with Alec Ounsworth; he helped him build his studio and engineered his solo album. He saw the furious internet attention paid to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah circa 2005, and then saw the relatively gross internet negligence to anything Alec or his band did exactly one year after that—even though the music was basically the same. It’s not like they made a radical change.

But guess who did? The Flaming Lips! And yet the Lips’ generation of fans—let’s be honest, even Wayne is going gray—has largely stuck with the band, or at least paid attention. Because there’s a history. A discography. Parts of it that I despise. Parts that I don’t even know (yet). Parts that I spent my money from an after-school job on in 1993 and was nearly tethered to.

Next time we’ll get back into, y’know, the actual songs on The Terror. In other Terror-related news, here’s a new interview with Wayne Coyne; some very good insight into the track “Try To Explain” toward the end of the piece.

*Light Heat is basically Quentin Stoltzfus (whose former incarnation, Mazarin, made him the prince of Philly psych-rock) plus the Walkmen. It is unfair to other bands that this fortuitous pairing was allowed to occur, and the resulting album sounds like JAMC’s Darklands, the Velvet Underground and, well, Mazarin and the Walkmen.