Release Date: April 16, 2013
For some, The Flaming Lips represent a sonic optimism, an enthusiasm for life. The fans come again and again for the circus where animals dance to loud, happy music and Wayne Coyne wears his suit, rolls on the crowd inside a giant inflatable ball, and tells them how great they are again and again. Diametrically, the Lips’ latest release, The Terror, has been tagged as “morbid” or “disturbing.”
It was even before The Terror that a change was occurring for The Flaming Lips. Despite taking flak for working on a collaborative album with Ke$ha entitled Lip$ha, bumping heads with Eryka Badu, and gaining negative attention over Coyne’s personal affairs, the band has pushed itself to evolve past the old Flaming Lips formula.
A choppy chunk of static and synth reminiscent of a spaceship repeats as the drums build into the bulk of “Look… the Sun is Rising,” the first track on The Terror.
Coyne sings about surveillance craft flying overhead from the old government program MK Ultra, an operation that was shut down for its illegal surveillance and abhorrent practices.
While the 2002 single “Do You Realize??” said the setting sun, along with your problems, is only an illusion, “Look… the Sun is Rising” calls out that we’ve stopped looking toward the sun altogether and have become wrapped in paranoia.
On “You Lust,” the choppy static returns and ticks away each second with white fuzz. Coyne holds onto these grounds of deeply personal defense as he sings, “You’ve got a lot of nerve to fuck with me/because you know you’re just like me.” This could serve as a wake-up call for his critics. They too follow a “lust to succeed,” words which Coyne maliciously whispers over bizarre breaks in music that bring the song into avante-territory akin to The Residents.
Seeing as Ke$ha has been spotted wearing a t-shirt for The Residents’ album Duck Stab/Buster Glen, hopefully something great is in the works for Lip$ha, which could expose her commercially versed fandom to inspiring and experimental music, and vice-versa for the Lips’ fan base.
Throughout The Terror, ethereal atmospheres rise from the ashes of each song, and the same sounds keep coming back, though the sonic context gives them new light each time. Shimmering synths bubble up from below over and over, while samples of something like tiny motors hum in the background.
These audio motifs take the forefront on “You Are Alone,” and quick introductions are made by brass samples that slide in almost unrecognizably. An electric signal pings again and again while the ambient shimmers collide with 8-bit grumbles, a shining example of what attention to texture brings to a song.
The same shimmers and hums shroud “Turning Violent,” only for a jolt from a distorted and effect-soaked guitar to jolt in, similar to the jarring riffs found on 2009’s Embryonic.
The final track of The Terror is “Always There in Our Hearts.” Fittingly, the song is an exploration of the quintessential fear of humanity: the fear of death.
“Always There in Our Hearts” is the most upbeat track on the album, yet highlights the driving suspense that we all transform into purpose, as well as competitive strife that overwhelms true progress and joy.
“What is the Light?” from the Lips’ The Soft Bulletin (1999) was alternatively dubbed “An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the “Big Bang” That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe.”
The Terror comes off as a testing of that hypothesis by exploring the unpleasant and bridging the borderline into nihilistic ideas. Despite the change, which may be disturbing for some, The Flaming Lips has pushed itself in creative and ideological ways, and The Terror is another beautiful album in its catalog.
The Flaming Lips – The Terror tracklist:
- “Look… The Sun is Rising”
- “Be Free, A Way”
- “Try to Explain”
- “You Lust”
- “The Terror”
- “You Are Alone”
- “Butterfly, How Long it Takes to Die”
- “Turning Violent”
- “Always There in Our Hearts”
