"THE TERROR"
THE FLAMING LIPS
Music and Lyrics by The Flaming Lips
Produced by The Flaming Lips, Dave Fridmann and Scott Booker
Released April 16, 2013
THE FLAMING LIPS:
Wayne Coyne: Lead Vocals, Guitars, Bass Guitar, Keyboards, Percussion
Michael Ivans: Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals
Steven Drozd: Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards, Drums, Percussion
Kliph Scurlock: Drums and PercussionDerek Brown: Guitars, Keyboards, Percussion, Backing Vocals
"We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear, that love, somehow, would save us that, yeah, if we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive and if there is no love, there would be no life. 'The Terror' is, we know now, that even without love, life goes on... we just go on… there is no mercy killing."
-Wayne Coyne
And so sets the stage for the latest album from The Flaming Lips, an existentially and perceptively grim listening experience that is and also is not as terrifying at the title suggests.
I must admit that I am a very late arrival to The Flaming Lips' listening party as I, and I would think and many other listeners, discovered them considerably late within their 30 year and still counting career. A friend suggested that I hear their breakthrough album "The Soft Bulletin" (released June 22, 1999), and while their sonic palate did intrigue me, the experience just didn't take at the time. It wasn't until the release of "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" (released July 26, 2002), where the musical mission of The Flaming Lips began to make sense, with that album's highly unusual mixture of hip-hop beats, a lushly and almost orchestral sound to the proceedings, science fiction concept album themes, cartoon aesthetics and then, a sharp nose dive into deeply resonate and troubling explorations into the fragility of the human condition in regards to pacifism, unrequited and lost love, and issues of mortality on songs like "In The Morning Of The Magicians," "Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell," and "All We Have Is Now."
By the time "At War With The Mystics" (released April 4, 2006) entered the world, I was more than ready for the band and that album, despite the surprisingly disappointed grumblings I have seen surrounding that album's quality, to me sounded like the final act of a gorgeous musical trilogy as they key themes expressed within the previous two albums were revisited and explored to even deeper effect.
Throughout that stage of their career, The Flaming Lips gained this reputation as being this day-glo colored, plush, soft and cuddly animal adored act perhaps due to their live shows with exploding confetti and the giant bouncing ball lead singer and main conspirator Wayne Coyne would roll through the audiences inside of. And of course, there was the beautiful song "Do You Realize??" from the "Yoshimi" album, which implored the need to express our love for those who are nearest and dearest to ourselves and presented through a nearly Walt Disney-esque sound. To my ears, the band never really sounded very warm and fuzzy to me. Yes, they have their off-kilter humor and the visual dynamics of their stage shows but the songs that have hit me the deepest are in fact, the darkest, the very songs that have been a crucial piece of their musical puzzle all along.
When you listen to "The Soft Bulletin," "Yoshimi Battles The Bink Robots," and "At War With The Mystics," which songs connect with you or leave the greatest impressions? For me, it is not the bright, shiny happy material as stunning as those songs are. The ones that have grabbed me, in addition to the ones that I have already mentioned, are tracks like "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," "The Spark That Bled (The Softest Bullet Ever Shot)," "The Sound Of Failure/It's Dark...Is It Always This Dark??," "Mr. Ambulance Driver," "Vein Of Stars," and "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life As Blazing Shield Of Defiance And Optimism As Celestial Spear Of Action)." Those selections and others are powerful experiences in and of themselves as they formulate the audio interpretation of being a solitary figure spiraling in and through a cold, vast, endless universe, as well as throughout all existence and non-existence, and just how, oh how do we ever navigate ourselves and our spirits through something so inconceivable and impossible to understand? Do those concepts sound innocuously warm and fuzzy to you? I didn't think so.
With the arrival of "Embryonic" (released October 13, 2009), The Flaming Lips took a purposefully darker turn and made a swan dive into a cyclical existential abyss of an album which roughed up their sound into something much more abrasive and disturbing. It was like being lost inside of a bad dream. Now, with the release of "The Terror," it would seem as if the band was still caught in the throes of their musical nightmare and on an certain level, that is true. But I am here to say that the new album is a surprisingly calmer and even warmer listening experience as the "into-the-red" loudness and harshness of "Embryonic" has been tempered considerably.
With the album's nine songs and 55 minute running time, "The Terror" is The Flaming Lips' extended and continuous song cycle depicting a soul in crisis. It is more than reminiscent of Pink Floyd of course, but I would also say that "The Terror" has more than its share of similarities with, of all things, The Beach Boys' melancholy classic "Pet Sounds" (released May 16, 1966), an album which also tenderly, painfully and beautifully explored the thoughts hopes, fears, wishes and failings of a solitary soul in a world that he could not fully understand, engage with or navigate as seemingly successfully as the rest of the human race.
The Flaming Lips set the stage with "Look...The Sun Rising," on which our narrator expresses that with the sun, "You want it to love you/It's peaceful voice is loud." But on the very next track, "Be Free, A Way," he acknowledges that "The sun shines down/But we're still cold/It's light is not a light that shines." Within those opening two songs, we are given a protagonist, perhaps submerged within depression, grief or addiction or all of the above, for whom the arrival of the sun is not a blessing but a symbol and reminder that life, even at its most unbearable, continues onwards and onwards, even when you may wish for the sun to never shine again.
"The Terror" continues onwards with unanswerable questions concerning the worthiness of ever loving anyone ("Try To Explain"), the ability or inability to control our worst impulses towards each other and ourselves ("Turn Violent") and in one of the album's most striking sections, the band tackles the concept of our sense of aloneness in the stunning "You Are Alone," a call and response track in which one voice in one speaker proclaims "I'm not alone" while another voice (or maybe, the same voice) in the opposite speaker contradicts, "You are alone."
The album scales intense heights on the 13 minute "You Lust," a track that is decidedly non-erotic, despite its title but entirely about our lust to succeed at the expense of our collective humanity towards others. Musically and sonically, The Flaming Lips head straight into Pink Floyd territory with its collective of analog synthesizers, loops, and slow burn martial drumming which gives the track a powerfully building sense of suspense and tension that never finds its release.
Where "The Terror" finds a certain balance so as not to become a listening experience so extreme that it is nothing less than a depressive journey is how the production and performance merges with the lyrics and subject matter. I have found myself listening to the album in its entirety on repeat in my car as the sonics of the music and the ghostly moan of Wayne Coyne's floating vocals have carried me through, a combination which makes everything feel like a person's continuous thoughts travelling and burrowing their way deeply into the recesses of the mind and spirit. The instrumentation of the album, while not any less lush, is a bit sparer than on previous albums as the music was reportedly largely created by the band's multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, with the full band performing on just a couple of tracks. I loved the usage of those aforementioned analog synthesizers throughout the album as those sounds have always been stranger, creepier and yet somehow warmer than the "perfect" synths that exist today. The imperfections with those synthetics feel more human, and therefore more humane to me, a quality that makes "The Terror" a wholly communal experience rather than a solitary one.
Without question, we have all found ourselves caught in despair, some more often and more constant than others, but it would be a lie to suggest that all of us have not been to that dark hole at some point. That realization is the magic of this album, a piece of music that feels so singular but is indeed representative of everybody on this Earth. We are always together in our aloneness and our combined sense of confusion, loss and even terror that we fall into can maybe feel less daunting, even a tiny bit less daunting when we know that someone else has been there too, an understanding that can possibly provide some solace and even hope.
And for me, "The Terror" provides that exact, precise and knowing sense of solace and hope and if you give this album a spin, I hope it provides the same for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment