In January of this year, head Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne announced that, as a follow-up to the band’s monumental 2009 album, Embryonic, the band would release a track every month for the rest of the year.
Coyne told Rolling Stone magazine that creating a whole new album the traditional way seemed daunting and the song-a-month system would be a more exciting way to get their music out.
‘Not that I think the old way was boring,” said Coyne, ‘but to spend another two years with the same 13 songs? We want to try to live through our music as we create it instead of it being a collection of the last couple of years of our lives.
‘The dilemma is whether we are going to release it on vinyl, cereal boxes or some of it on toys that we make.”
Valentine’s Day saw the release of the first track, Two Blobs Fucking, a song that exists as 12 separate pieces on YouTube and must be played simultaneously to be heard as the band intended.
Then in March the Lips released a collaborative, limited-edition EP, The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian, on colour vinyl available at a handful of American record stores. It has yet to be released in any other format — although in this age of file-sharing and internet-distributed music, the EP’s four tracks have already travelled halfway around the world, thanks to some intrepid vinyl rippers. The highlight of the tracks is rather bizarrely titled Is David Bowie Dying?
It sees the band returning to the more abrasive psychedelic sounds that dominated Embryonic, which seemed to draw influences from psychedelic electronic duo Silver Apples and German Krautrock outfits such as Can and Neu!
Ambient bliss
On the EP, Alan’s Theremin is a piece of psychedelic drone that slips into some ambient bliss, You Don’t Respond is a crunchy reverb-drenched number and Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth, Part 2 is a two-minute sci-fi sound sketch that didn’t leave too much of an impression after the first few listens.
Then on April 20, Coyne announced on his Twitter page that he would be delivering a number of new Flaming Lips EPs to select radio stores in the United States. But this time they wouldn’t come as YouTube clips or on coloured vinyl but would be on a USB memory stick buried inside a large edible gummy bear skull.
The new EP has been dubbed Gummy Song Skull and contains four tracks, which on the first listen are a lot better than the material on the previous EP.
Drug Chart picks up where Convinced of the Hex, the first single of Embryonic, left off, while In Our Bodies, Out of Our Heads sounds like Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis and sees the Lips exploring new sonic territory.
Squelching spoken-word soundscape
Walk with Me is a pulsing tune that sounds like David Bowie circa Outside, the industrial influenced album he recorded with Brian Eno in 1995. It segues into Hillary’s Time Ma-chine Machine, a squelching spoken-word soundscape that is more filler than essential.
Regardless, the Flaming Lips appear to be making good on their promise to deliver regular music throughout 2011 — they have released nine songs in three months.
Where they go from here, who knows but at least we can draw comfort from the fact that these psychedelic pioneers are still pushing boundaries almost 30 years into their career.
And with their new music being released only in severely limited forms in the US, all you need is an internet connection and the know-how to find the tracks for free and follow their crazy journey.
Long live the Flaming Lips!