(Warner Bros.)
RECOMMENDED
[** see note at bottom **]
In 2009, the Flaming Lips released their best album in a decade, the darkly psychedelic Embryonic. Since then they've been given goodwill from their fanbase and their record label in the form of, as Wayne Coyne told Billboard, the "freedom to fuck around." This campaign of nuttiness began with the 2010 release of an album-length cover version of The Dark Side of the Moon, which I admittedly skipped. In 2011, though, in amongst an outpouring of oddities have been three major dumps of intriguing new material from one of the world's most prolific and creatively restless bands.
The most conventional of these so far has been the 12" EP-length collaboration with Mexican chillwavers Neon Indian, not at all an obvious match for the Lips. The release itself was issued on vinyl only, the severely limited number of copies distributed to record stores personally by band members. The content, if you can find it, does not disappoint: The most traditional cut is opener "Is David Bowie Dying," an appropriately droning killing off of a hero that sounds, indeed, like David Bowie -- plodding and tense like Talking Heads' "The Overload," the song is a must. Fans are also likely to appreciate Minutemen sequel "Do YOu Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth (Part 2)," on which Neon Indian's influence is impossible to detect. But I'm even more attracted to the two oddities in the middle, the experimental headfuck "You Don't Respond" and the meandering "Alan's Theremin," a hypnotic but appealingly minimalistic jam that recalls some of Yo La Tengo's best extended lullabys.
The virtues of the two middle selections, "Theremin" especially, carry over to the Lips' best song of the year to date, the arresting, minimal but gorgeous "Hillary's Time Machine Machine," a nine-minute trance into nocturnal guitar and a sleepy comedown. Simultaneously comforting and creepy, it's a piece of instrumental rock mastery. Unfortunately, the only way to hear it (legally) is to purchase the foreboding object seen above, bite into it, and slobber your way through a big hunk of candy until you find a USB flash drive that includes four new Flaming Lips songs, totalling twenty-five minutes. All for the low ebay price of $199 and rising!
Don't pay $199 and you will be missing out on two tracks from the Lips' obnoxious, indulgent side -- the wah-wah video game soundtrack "In Our Bodies, Out of Our Heads" and the '80s Bowie riff "Walk with Me" -- but also a soaring, triumphant chorus on the lovely "Drug Chart." One has to wonder about what the bosses at Warner Music Group think of a stunt like this. I couldn't even get them to send me an Iron & Wine press kit this January, but they'll underwrite a few hundred giant gummy skulls? Releasing music in this manner equates essentially to, if you're very naive, not releasing it at all or -- more realistically - releasing it for free, because I'd wager barely a dozen of the 1,365 listeners "Walk with Me" has on last.fm gnawed their way through those colorful brains.
Luckily, the other big Lips moment of the year, and curiously the one that seemed to ignite the most fanfare, was free. Free! Through the magic of YouTube, the Lips both minimized their Zaireeka (their boxed set of 4 CDs that had to be played simultaneously) experiment by reducing its length to about three minutes and maximized it by requiring twelve YouTube videos to be played at once. And calling it "Two Blobs Fucking," thus guaranteeing that the corresponding SteveHoffman.TV thread would mostly consist of generational hemming and hawing about "that word." Various web experiments have been put in place to allow the twelve to start automatically and simultaneously, but one wonders -- if human error isn't the point of projects like this, what is the point? That is, if I'm understanding all this correctly, and if Brian Eno's experiments in the same capacity, which predated the Lips', are a worthy guide, I am. If every version of "Two Blobs Fucking" is the same, why bother? Is this all just to exercise our clicky fingers? At any rate, it's easy to find a synced audio-only rip, which will reveal that "Blobs" is a curio and not much else.
When I was a teenager in the '90s, as a function of both my obsessive personality and the fact that one of my first favorite bands was R.E.M. whose rarities tend to be sublime, if I grew seriously infatuated with a band I had to own every song they released, ever. All the b-sides and compilation tracks, which in the pre-Napster world were often a bitch and a half to find; I collected the confusing two-part import singles to get this or that elusive track, I slaved over whether this or that live track or remix was worth the trouble as opposed to an all-new studio cut, and I remember trolling pawn shop aisles for weird VA comps like DGC Rarities, No Alternative, and the Batman Forever soundtrack. I've gotten over that -- there's a Yo La Tengo song I've never heard and cannot find anywhere on a vinyl compilation I see on ebay for some extravagant price every day, and I am not even tempted, as badly as I want to hear the song -- but I can't help thinking of my 14 year-old self when bands like the Lips do something of this nature, and it continues to bug me when I can't have all the music by a great band easily at my fingertips. I don't begrudge Coyne and company the fun of coming up with wild and crazy alternatives to simple album or EP or single formats, and I strongly prefer their support of independent record stores to the tendency toward relatively dull marginalia like "iTunes exclusives." But I'll repeat the point I made in talking about the Mountain Goats cassette recently: I wish stuff could just be available and not suspended inside gross gooey candy and outdated media. But I suppose those days are over.
[Note on Recommendation: The boldfaced opinion at the top reflects these three releases taken as one whole, on a purely musical basis. Caveat to follow -- These Lips releases are commanding outrageous prices on ebay as we speak. Hardcore fans who can get a copy of the Neon Indian 12" for less than $40 are advised to do so, as the record is consistently very good. The gummy skull, while it contains songs that'd be above average b-sides, is consumer fraud for anyone who isn't a psychotic Lips fan, as even directly from the band it's being sold for $150 or so. I have trouble thinking of a USB stick inside a piece of candy, particularly one that's $150 or so, as an "EP" or "single" or pretty much anything. Call me old fashioned. This is at bottom just four Lips rarities on a flash drive, nothing earth-shaking, and certainly nothing as unified as the Neon Indian collab. So do what I did; hit bit torrent (or your crazy friend) for it and stick it a folder with a synced-up "Two Blobs." Voila, you have caught up with the Flaming Lips. For now.]
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