Looking at the song titles on American Head, the new album from The Flaming Lips out today via Bella Union, a prospective listener could fear that this lot have slipped dangerously close to self-parody. Loaded with drug references, the track names seem ridiculous, and the concept album device a hoary old one. That said, the record is fairly concise, largely affecting, and surprisingly tuneful in spots. I found myself surprised, frankly, at how much I enjoyed this.
"Will You Return / When You Come Down" and "Watching the Lightbugs Glow" are blissful, nearly serene ruminations on existence itself. It feels as if the songs are unfolding outwards and a listener can't but help and think of the better moments on an old Moody Blues record, when the silliness intersected with the genuinely beautiful and transcendence was achieved. "Dinosaurs on the Mountain" is fun too, but by the time we get the wonderfully-titled "At the Movies on Quaaludes" it's clear that this journey of Wayne Coyne's is a chemically-induced one.
And while Coyne's made much of this record being the band's realization of their American roots, the record still sounds remarkably like space rock from the other side of the Atlantic from a half-century ago. Still, "Mother, I've Taken LSD" recalls Nineties Lips stuff, while "You n Me Sellin' Weed" works in enough of a twang to make the track feel more like the Byrds or Dead than the Beatles of Zombies. But the feeling's a faint one, and The Flaming Lips never entirely shake their own roots, with this stuff expanding outward, like a balloon being blown up, with the kind of rippling melodic lines that feel both druggy and wise simultaneously. Coyne, somewhat remarkably, can do this kind of thing and not let it get out of his control, with the many tracks here taking huge risks but the entire enterprise being rather focused overall. If "Assassins of Youth" didn't quite work for me, the aching "Mother, Please Don't be Sad" and the direct "My Religion is You", with guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, hit the exact kind of pleasure-points the best Lips numbers usually hit. If these, like many numbers here, suggest that the band could use with more variety in terms of tempos, at least the entirety of American Head works its magic in under an hour, Coyne taking us on a concise trip that the hippies in the Sixties would have gotten lost in.
American Head is out today via Bella Union.
More details on The Flaming Lips via the band's official website.
[Photo: George Salisbury]