THE FLAMING LIPS

SPACE CASES 

The Flaming Lips get high with a little help from their Heady Fwends

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 02, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/

AVANT GARDENING: The Lips stay strange on the new Fwends

Bottle-blond rapstress Ke$ha, indie beardo Bon Iver, glitch-hop auteur Prefuse 73, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, goth overlord Nick Cave, soul sistah Erykah Badu, and the one and only Yoko Ono are just a few of friendly folks who turn up on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, the new album by a band who, along with massive rodeos, the not quite mighty enough Thunder, and Gennifer Flowers, stand as one of the more noteworthy products of Oklahoma City. Add Biz Markie, and a handful of hip underground artists with names like Lightening Bolt, Tame Impala, and Neon Indian to the mix, and you've got a pretty impressive, suitably eclectic guest list for the sort of mercurial madness that's become a Flaming Lips specialty. But if there's a cosmic joke here, then the punch line is that Fwends was never really meant for widespread release: the disc was originally little more than a super limited edition, vinyl-only keepsake for the few lucky fans who snatched up copies in the early hours of Record Store Day this past April 21. In fact, Warner Bros. was already in the early stages of prepping for the arrival of the Lips’ next proper studio album, due late this year, when popular demand for Fwends compelled the label to repackage it in CD and downloadable form for worldwide release this week.

COOL CAMEOS: The Flaming Lips invite everyone from Nick Cave and Yoko Ono, to Bon Iver and Erykah Badu to join them on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (Warner Bros.)

       Record Store Day began in 2007 as a loosely organized underground push back against the rising tide of digital downloading and as a way for engaged artists like the Flaming Lips to support an ailing network of independently owned brick-and-mortar record shops while providing fans with often elaborately designed vinyl collectables. But as it has grown in size and stature, it's become emblematic of a larger cultural shift, as the hunger for vinyl, which waned after the introduction of CDs, has steadily grown in recent years. The latest numbers show a 50% increase in annual vinyl sales, from 2.8 million units in 2010 to almost 4 million last year. It's still a niche market. But, as the Flaming Lips have demonstrated with Fwends, it's having an increasingly significant impact on artist creativity, the machinations of the music business, and vagaries of consumer behavior.

       Or, to put it more bluntly, Fwends, for all its compelling cameos, is the kind of willfully difficult and sonically challenging album that major labels have been known to reject out of hand because there simply isn't anything even resembling a radio-friendly single here. The disc opens with an amusing false start by Ke$ha, who, once she recovers, offers this uplifting observation: "Well, it's 2012, think we're going to hell/Put me under your acid spell/I want my mind to be complete toast." A robotic voice interrupts her flow with the sinister directive, "You must be upgraded," as a primal beat pounds in the background and a synth set to mimic a malfunctioning alarm signals at irregular intervals. It's intriguing in the same way that putting Rihanna in the studio with Radiohead at their most radical might be, which is to say that it's essentially a determined study in the aesthetics of anti-pop.

       Admittedly, the Flaming Lips are definitely not a good place to set the baseline for where the music industry is headed, and the same goes for Ke$ha's cameo on "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)." The band may have cut their teeth bashing out psychedelically bent garage-punk in the mid-’80s, and found a home on alternative radio in 1993 with the melodically skewed yet catchy hit, "She Don't Use Jelly." But, before the end of that decade, frontman Wayne Coyne was engaged in all kinds of sonic explorations, like the band's boombox experiments, a series of events at which Coyne conducted orchestras of audience volunteers wielding portable cassette machines with tracks the Lips had recorded, while the rest of the band added drums and other elements to the symphonic overtures. The Lips, riding a wave of critical acclaim, even managed to convince Warner Bros. to release a four-CD set, Zaireeka, that required the listener to play all four discs simultaneously, and in sync, in order to hear the completed songs.

       That was in 1997. Over the last decade and a half, the Lips have artfully navigated a course somewhere between deconstructed avant gardens and epic space-rock formations, between harsh electronics and soothing organic tones, between the demands of a good brain tease and the pure pleasure of a pop hook. Fwends has its moments of clarity — Nick Cave's unhinged soliloquy in "You, Man? Human???"; the dirty, damaged-blooze drive of the Jim James-sung "That Ain't My Trip"; Erykah Badu's echo-drenched delivery of the Lips’ nearly broken version of the Roberta Flack hit "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." But, at over ten minutes long, even the latter can feel a bit like an endurance test. Which may very well be the point. Recordings like "Fwends" clearly aren't conceived for or aimed at a mass audience. But if parts of it manage to reach the ears of the uninitiated – of listeners who are used to the softer side of the Flaming Lips — the world will feel like a slightly better 

place to me, if only for a fleeting moment or two.