While those albums took a fantastical slant of their own, ‘American Head’ offers Coyne’s reflections on his and the band’s life stories, quasi-autobiographical yet simultaneously existing in its own alternate reality. Like ‘The Terror’, the band’s latest is more personal in a way that can’t be achieved when you have Reggie Watts discussing unicorn shit or The Clash’s Mick Jones providing a voice-over as each did on ‘American Head’s immediate conceptual predecessors, ‘Oczy Mlody’ and ‘King’s Mouth’. Home, history and family are the impetus and with this focus, ‘American Head’ unfolds with a beauty that The Flaming Lips’ albums haven’t touched on for a while now.Īlthough progressive, the records that followed ‘The Soft Bulletin’ and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ came with a certain amount of baggage an embarrassment of riches, heavy on diatribe, weighty in subject matter and distracting with superfluous characters, narrators and guest turns.
This was true to an extent with 2013’s ‘The Terror’, but where that album immersed itself in desolation, ‘American Head’ takes an expansive breath and despite the swollen line-up this collection is as airy and uncluttered as the band has ever sounded. Less has often been more in Flaming Lips land, the sense that the nucleus of Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd operating in insularity is when the real magic comes naturally. The Flaming Lips now counts seven musicians among its ranks and de facto leader, Wayne Coyne, has suggested a kinship with The Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic, not so much in the music itself but in the ensembles that create it. While we’re used to seeing them as free-wheeling interstellar explorers who just happen to come from the planet earth, on ‘American Head’ the Oklahoma-based outfit roots itself within the pantheon of American music. On every new release you hand yourself over and say: “Okay, where are we off to this time?” That journey could lead you anywhere but rarely has a Flaming Lips album been so overtly anchored in one place. It’s kind of nice then to receive something as pure and simple as ‘American Head’ from a band whose capacity to surprise is seemingly infinite. Peppers…’ and ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ and the obligatory Christmas album recorded under an alias.
#The flaming lips albums full#
The full list of endeavours is long, fascinating and infuriating but to give a taster we’ve had a live 24-hour-long improvised song, music delivered via a gummy skull, full-on track-by-track cover versions of ‘The Stone Roses’ debut, ‘Sgt.
With sixteen official studio albums and any number of collaborations, curios and side-projects, The Flaming Lips always seem in danger of spreading themselves a bit too thin.