It’s where the Lips flipped off their sunnier tendencies and explored the darker side of their influences, and no album better showcases the diversity of this era of the Lips than Heady Fwends. But when it comes to personal tastes, I find their run from 2009 to 2013 just as essential. Most people would say the Lips’ peak runs from 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic to 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and I would say: you’re probably right. And like the best Lips albums, this one leaves you dreaming about where the band is going to take us next.ĥ. Songs like “You and Me Sellin’ Weed”, “Flowers of Neptune 6”, and “Will You Return/When You Come Down”, all gorgeous sighs of song, are some of the most moving the Lips have ever recorded. The production flourishes are dialed back to serve the songs, with bells, strings, and synths (and Kacey Musgraves) floating through the mix instead of directing the show and exposing some of the most mature and touching lyrics in the Lips catalogue this side of “Do You Realize?”. American Head is easily one of the prettiest Lips releases, using bucolic and folksy sounds as the backdrop for Wayne’s ruminations on childhood and innocence lost. The best Flaming Lips albums have a central concept holding them together, and after several years in the wilderness, American Head shows the Lips can still rally around an idea and spin an affecting tale that lasts across an entire album. They’d sand the edges off their sound (and nearly jettison electric guitars altogether) on their next few acclaimed albums, but Clouds is a scuzzy masterpiece in its own right, the last Lips album you could thrash to before they moved onto more mature themes and sounds. The highlights are almost too many to name: the madcap apocalyptic animal imagery of “Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles”, the bouncing bass groove of “This Here Giraffe”, the jangly nihilistic “Evil Will Prevail”. had produced thus far, and it’s outta this world capital-f Fun. What follows are the most melodic, well-arranged, and hilarious songs Coyne & Co. Fitting, then, that first track “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” sounds like a coronation and funeral send-off at the same time.
This is the point where the Lips became an essential band, and the albums that follow in this list are all just varying shades of the gold first glimpsed here.Ĭlouds Taste Metallic is the big payoff, the culmination of every Lips album that came before, and the last true alt-rock album they made before making the jump into…well, all the crazy shit they’ve been doing since. Hit to Death is still swarming with noise, but the band peel back the curtain just enough to make the album sound like a total revelation in their discography. Cellos, horns, three-part harmonies, and overlapping melodies work their way into the mix, elevating tracks like “Hit Me Like You Did the First Time” and “The Sun” from noise blowouts to transcendent shoegaue-adjacent spirituals. This refinement album over album made the biggest leap with Hit to Death in the Future Head, where the Lips really leaned into their Beatles worship and matched their inventive instrumentation with honest-to-god songs. The stretch of albums from In a Priest Driven Ambulance to Clouds Taste Metallic is where the Lips hit their stride, burrowing into their unique vein of psychedelia in pursuit of a singular sound. The fact that the band could go from Yoshimi to this in a few short years might be the Lips’ biggest head-scratcher or all.ĩ. In a discography with as many head-scratchers as this one, At War With the Mystics is the one truly cloying album.
But there’s no missing the fact that out of this bunch, only half the songs are listenable. Ambulance Driver”, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung”) are actually fantastic, unique entries in the Lips canon. So much of this album is actively annoying, it obscures the highlights, the highest of which (“Mr. The band was coming off two stone-cold classics, they’d never been more culturally relevant, and “W.A.N.D.” was a spiky, political rock track in a time that seemed politically tense.* Too bad the album turned out to be terrible.** The first two songs, “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “Free Radicals”, sound less like songs than showcases of how many weird blips and burps the Lips could fit into 8 minutes. When At War With the Mystics was announced with lead single “The W.A.N.D.”, expectations couldn’t have been higher.
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