Album review: The Flaming Lips: The Terror

A band best known for their euphoric psychedelia had to crash sometime, and they’ve done it in style with an earnest, heartfelt and buzzkilling release

The Flaming Lips: The Terror

Bella Union

* * * *

Followers of the Way of Wayne, a cult I have just made up but which might as well exist among fans of The Flaming Lips and their gonzo psychedelic aesthetic, have enjoyed a wild ride of it in recent times as Wayne Coyne and his merry band of musical marauders have indulged in a series of increasingly wacky yet inspired whims, covering classic albums by Pink Floyd, King Crimson and now The Stone Roses, recording a six-hour song, then recording a 24-hour song onto a memory stick packaged in a skull. At least those royalties from Do You Realize?? have been put to inventive use.

Last year, they released an album of eccentric collaborations – including a song asking Is David Bowie Dying? – with their so-called Heady Fwends, including Yoko Ono, Lightning Bolt, Tame Impala and Jim James of My Morning Jacket – fruitloops to a man, so no surprises there. Erykah Badu dipped her toes in the Lips lysergic concoction, then woke up, remembered she had filmed a video naked in a bathtub, threw an online hissy fit and artistically divorced her new fwends.

But The Terror, their 13th album proper, is stranger still than the sound of pop trashmonger Ke$ha and Wayne Coyne in the same studio performing an Iggy Pop pastiche. Having moved relentlessly towards the light – and pop success – up to the mid-2000s, propelled by celebratory live shows involving dancing aliens, bouncing balloons, spaceships and communal euphoria, the Lips have left their technicolour Oz and headed back through the wormhole to explore, if not necessarily embrace, the dark side with this compelling suite of claustrophobic, otherworldly, often arrhythmic phase-shifting soundscapes created on their collection of rare old synthesizers.

Coyne explains it thus: “We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear … we know now that, even without love, life goes on … we just go on … there is no mercy killing.” Well, thanks a bunch for the buzzkill. This statement, like the album as a whole, makes more sense in the light of Coyne’s split from his wife of 25 years and his right-hand multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd’s relapse into drug abuse a couple of years ago.

The Terror is arguably more Drozd’s trip than Coyne’s, created on his hardware, often with his lyrics and synthesized voice which contrasts with Coyne’s vulnerable falsetto. This disquieting sound collage was recorded quickly in a matter of days (or, rather, nights) with regular Lips producer Dave Fridman, using the “sleepwalker’s dimension” – those early hours when night turns to day and only farmers and rock stars are awake.

In that context, opening track Look … The Sun Is Rising is probably more of an observation made in the middle of a session than a harbinger of light, a nod to that moment when ghouls have to go to bed and normal service must be resumed. It makes for a fascinating tribal drum and drone-fuelled proggy excursion, capped with monastic mantras, curt bursts of guitar distortion and a muffled lonesome melody seeping from the netherworld.

The melody of Be Free, A Way is even more haunting, with a devotional quality given a minor key twist, which is allowed to breathe more against a minimal fuzzy electro backing. Coyne also sounds ethereal and desolate on the woozy, pulsing 13-minute centrepiece You Lust, which is soothing in its peculiar way, at least until the creepy chorus comprising the repeated whispered refrain “lust to succeed” turns up. For the beholder, it’s the acid flashback, the post-amphetamine-rush paranoia and the cold turkey sweats all in one, all available for comfortable consumption on your listening device of choice.

And so it goes. The Terror modulates between moments of affecting beauty and unsettling atmospheres, such as the reverb-laden dialogue at the heart of You Are Alone or the disorientating drone and ugly/beautiful tune of Turning Violent.

That ambivalence is arguably best enshrined by the spacey jazz thrum of Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die but the entire album, which begs to be considered as a whole, is an utterly absorbing meditation on loss, confusion and heartbreak, disguised as an experimental odyssey. Anyone underwhelmed by the new My Bloody Valentine album is advised to check in here.

The Terror is typically atypical of The Flaming Lips – just when you thought they were committed to eccentric enterprises, they produce something heartfelt and earnest. It may be the depression after the high, the moment you realise all those friends you made at that party in your head aren’t really your friends, all those creative schemes you dreamed up will never come to fruition because they’re all rubbish and you are all alone in the garbage dump at the fag end of a hostile universe, but I can’t recommend it highly enough.